Read it through once

Plymouth’s Harvest Home conformed in most essentials to its English prototype. It was, for example, deliberately long. William Bradford, the governor, began the holiday when he sent out four of the best hunters for fresh meat. They returned that evening with enough fowl—geese, ducks, and possibly turkeys—to last a week. During this period there were various traditional “recreations,” one of which was parading of sorts. In England villagers customarily marched through the fields of stubble, singing the old harvest songs, waving handfuls of grain often plaited into kern or corn dolls. The men would then demonstrate their prowess with firearms or longbows. When Winslow writes, “... amongst other recreations; we exercised our arms,” he is referring to customs like these. It is doubtful that any kern dolls were fashioned at Plymouth; Puritans did not take kindly to graven images of the Mother Earth or Mary sort. But they had muskets and fowling pieces, and under the command of Miles Standish, a professional soldier, they acquired some of the noisier martial skills. Harvest Home gave them a chance to demonstrate these to each other and to Massasoit’s Indians. The turkey shoot held in many rural communities before Thanksgiving is a modern survival of this harvest custom. Another traditional recreation was athletics. Englishmen were serious sportsmen. King James had even issued a Book of Sports in 1618, which enumerated those “lawfulsports” like “archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation ...” suitable for playing after church. Puritans were not against sports as such, but they were against them on religious holidays; the Sabbath was not made for sporting. For example, on Christmas Day, 1621, William Bradford chided some of the newer settlers in Plymouth for playing “stool ball” (an ancestor of cricket) and “pitching the bar” (weight throwing):