Decorating placemats for thanksgiving is a great way to start a conversation about what the pilgrims ate at the first thanksgiving and how that compares to what your family enjoys. And you can wow everyone with your knowledge of the pilgrims’ menu. It’s also your chance to help create a festive dinner table.
Supplies Needed:
Vinyl Placemat
Fabric Paint
Styrofoam plates
Foods for stamping (corn on the cob, potato, nuts)
Lay out newspaper to protect your work space. Clean your placemat. Squeeze a bit of paint onto each Styrofoam plate, one color on each plate.
Decide what you’d like to use for stamps. I recommend rolling corn on the cob in the paint and then across the place mat. It leaves an interesting pattern. Potatoes are good for stamping, too, because you can cut any shape out of them that you want. (Have an adult help you with this step.) You could use potatoes to stamp turkeys or cornucopias onto the placemat. Use anything you can think of, but be sure you have permission to use the supplies.
When your placemat is perfect, let it dry. If you do this today, it will be ready to decorate your Thanksgiving table tomorrow.
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The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621 to celebrate the pilgrims’ first successful harvest. The celebration lasted several days and included indoor and outdoor feasts. Sometimes the pilgrims and Native Americans ate together, as shown in Brownscombe’s painting, and sometimes they ate separately.
In Henry A. Bacon’s Landing of the Pilgrims you can see the Mayflower in the distance as a few of its passengers unload from a lifeboat onto Plymouth Rock. Bacon was born in 1840 in Massachusetts and fought for the north in the Civil War. He studied art in Paris and went on to produce many paintings designed to tell a story, like this one painted in 1877. Notice the girl who is preparing to step from the boat. She is 15 year old Mary Chilton, said to have been the first pilgrim to set foot in the Massachusetts.
These two seem to be very accurate paintings of this historical event but there are others which do not follow the accounts we have of the landing. Henry Sargent’s Landing of the Pilgrims is one such painting. Here you see the Native Americans greeting (or confronting) the pilgrims as they land. This did not happen. It was about three months after the pilgrims landed when the Native Americans approached them for the first time.
Next week: paintings of the first Thanksgiving, plus Thanksgiving craft projects!
The Mayflower Compact was signed by the 41 men on the ship before they went ashore. Edward Percy Moran’s The Signing of the Compact in the Cabin of the Mayflower, shown here, is one artist’s idea of what this might have looked like.
