A Pioneer Thanksgiving: A Story of Harvest Celebrations in 1841

Barbara Robertson is the author of Wilfrid Laurier: The Great
Conciliator and the co-author of The Well-Filled Cupboard.

A Pioneer Thanksgiving is not so much a sequel, as the blurb puts it, as
a supplement to Barbara Greenwood’s A Pioneer Story (1994), for it
involves the same family, place, and period—the Robertsons in Upper
Canada, 1841. Here the splendid mix of history, stories, activities, and
crafts is focused on a single event, Thanksgiving. Heather Collins’s
illustrations are attractively in tune with the period and text.

Greenwood’s stories illustrate various aspects of pioneer life, among
them hazards for children—cranberry bogs where they can drown, and
deep woods where they can get lost. Her account of Thanksgiving
celebrations encompasses a wide variety, such as those of Native people
like the Ojibwa, Martin Frobisher on Baffin Island in 1578, and the
Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1621.

As well, there is a plentiful harvest of related crafts and activities,
ranging from the easy, like making cranberry sauce, to the formidable,
like breadmaking. Such activities as making and playing conkers and even
making a weather vane are reasonably feasible.

Those who enjoyed A Pioneer Story will be pleased with A Pioneer
Thanksgiving; those who have so far been deprived of the treats both
books have to offer should start with the first and proceed to the
second.