Pilgrims

On Thanksgiving morning, let your energetic school-age kids create humorous place-favors with personality.Long, curvy gourds or squash are best for this project. Before the children begin, an adult should trim the wide, rounded end of the vegetables with a knife so they stand upright on the table. Keep the short green stem at the opposite end intact.To make Pilgrims: Cut white paper into a 3-by-4-inch rectangle. Fold it in half widthwise. Cut out a hole in the middle of the paper, large enough to fit over the neck of the gourd/squash.

Think you are an American citizen? Well think again, because you and I are probably illegal immigrants There were no humans born on the original land mass of what is today known as the United States. The National Geographic Society thinks that the first inhabitants migrated to the Americas some 13,000 years ago, and they are not sure who got here first. That means that even our "native" Native Americans may be here illegally. So let us get something straight: When a citizen gripes about letting all these "foreigners" in, they should stop to reconsider: he or she might be one of them.

A GROUP from St. Louis Catholic Church in Clarksville attended World Youth Day in Toronto last month. The three adults and eight teens were part of a larger group that traveled with 140 people from the Archdiocese of Baltimore. "Our main focus was to come together as a faithful community," said St. Louis youth minister Pat Sprankle. "We're prayerful pilgrims." The students and their chaperons arrived July 22 for the weeklong celebration of World Youth Day. Opening ceremonies and a vigil Mass were held the next day at Exhibition Place, a 192-acre park on the shores of Lake Ontario.

A century ago, a crack English soccer team called the Pilgrims landed here, challenged Baltimore's best and offered a two-foot, $15,000 silver chalice to any club that could defeat it. Three local teams tried — and were crushed by a combined score of 38-0. The Brits kept the trophy, but the city struck it rich. Humbled by the outcome, Baltimore's soccer buffs — a melange of college-educated men and blue-collar immigrants — rallied to drum up interest, organize leagues and build playing fields, some of which are still in use. On Saturday, another of England's finest teams will hit town, and the seeds sown from those one-sided games long ago will be on display.

KUFA, Iraq -- A suicide bombing yesterday in southern Iraq underscored the fragility of Iraq's nascent religious tourism industry, which brings hundreds of thousands of dollars in foreign cash to the economically ravaged region each month. Meanwhile, skirmishes between U.S. forces and suspected insurgents continued for a second day in and around a 400-bed hospital in the western city of Ramadi, leaving at least one civilian dead and two Iraqi police officers injured, U.S. and hospital officials said.

Every year at Thanksgiving, I sit down to steaming bowls of food, bow my head and bless the home-grown goodies before me. I also give thanks that I wasn't a pilgrim. How those people managed to harvest anything at Plymouth, Mass., during the summer of 1621 is a mystery.The pilgrims brought few tools with them from England. There were no rototillers aboard the Mayflower. There wasn't even a plow.The pilgrims were woefully ignorant of the New England weather. Their early pea crop failed because the settlers planted on EST (English Spring Time)

"The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love and Death in Plymouth Colony," by James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, W.H. Freeman and Company. 366 pages. $24.95. And so, turkey-sated reader, what is your vision of the first Thanksgiving? Severe, teetotaling, black-clad Pilgrims assuming pious poses and offering thanks to God before feasting on turkey while a handful of noble savages observe? How about life in general in 17th century Plymouth Colony? More of the same, with Puritanical laws enforcing straight-laced behavior while men toiled selflessly and women stood meekly by?

JERUSALEM -- Route this to the Department of Whose Idea Wuz This, Anyway.The Israeli government trusts a couple of shadowy characters to deal with an erratic dictator, planning a publicity coup that will flout an international embargo and offend most of the Arab world by bringing Muslims to Israel.It backfired. Surprise.Yesterday, the 192 Libyan pilgrims welcomed with such fanfare in Israel the day before turned on their hosts. At a news conference, they called on "Muslims all over the world to contribute to the liberation of Jerusalem" from Israeli occupiers.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War Nathaniel Philbrick Viking / 461 pages / $29.95 The passengers on the Mayflower didn't discover New England, or even establish the first English colony in the United States. But they were the first group whose voyage to America wasn't motivated by conquest, cod or commerce. The Pilgrims earned their iconic status in American history by being the first English speakers who came to settle permanently in the New World. The colonists were naive and woefully unprepared, notes Nathaniel Philbrick in Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War. They were duped by the captain they hired to sail the Speedwell, the expedition's original vessel.

FOR MANY AMERICANS, Thanksgiving ladles on guilt with the gravy and giblets. Is it right that we should celebrate our material abundance in a world where 850 million people are underfed? That we should honor home when so many are homeless, and family when so many are estranged?Well, of course it is right to give thanks. There is no Garden of Eden: In our world, people are a mixed lot and lives have texture, rough and smooth. The Thanksgiving hymn recognizes as much: "Wheat and tares together sown, unto joy or sorrow grown."

BAGHDAD -Two bombers detonated suicide vests outside a gold-domed religious shrine Friday and killed at least 71 people, raising the toll in two days of attacks on Shiite Muslims in Iraq to 159 and reviving fears of a return to sectarian war. The attacks at the Imam Musa Khadimiyah shrine in northeast Baghdad raise concerns that the Sunni insurgency is regrouping just as U.S. forces are preparing to withdraw from Iraq's cities and President Barack Obama...

On February 8, 2009 ARTENTIOUS PILGRIM. Friends may visit the family owned MARCH FUNERAL HOME WEST, INC., 4300 Wabash Avenue on Thursday after 8:30 a.m. Family will receive friends Friday at Epworth United Methodist Chapel, 3217 St. Lukes Lane 11 a.m. Funeral Service to follow at 11:30.

NEW DELHI, India - A religious festival in northern India turned into a horrific deadly crush yesterday as thousands of Hindu pilgrims stampeded at a temple shrine, piling into each other on a treacherous walkway slick with spilled coconut milk. Officials said at least 168 people, most of them men, suffocated. Television images showed dead pilgrims strewn on the narrow walkway near the Chamunda Devi temple, at the southern edge of the 15th-century Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur, in the western state of Rajasthan.

BAGHDAD - Female bombers killed at least 57 people and wounded 280 in three attacks yesterday on Shiite pilgrims marching in Baghdad and a fourth on a Kurdish demonstration in Kirkuk. Twenty-five people were killed in Kirkuk and 178 wounded when a woman blew herself up, police and medical sources said. At least 32 people died and 102 were wounded in Baghdad in attacks by three female bombers. The bloodshed shattered a period that had seen a four-year low in Iraq violence. The decrease in attacks had prompted senior U.S. officials in Iraq to describe Sunni militants as a spent force no longer capable of toppling Iraq's Shiite-led government.

BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber blew himself up among Shiite Muslim pilgrims at a crowded rest stop yesterday, part of an eruption of sectarian violence that killed at least 43 people, injured 148 and tarnished one of Shiite Islam's holiest holidays. The bloodshed will put pressure on a truce first declared by a powerful Shiite militia in August. Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr renewed the cease-fire Friday for six more months in a move U.S. and Iraqi officials hope will reinforce recent security gains.

BAGHDAD -- Seven people were killed in Iraq's northwest yesterday when a rocket landed amid a gathering of Shiite Muslims celebrating the most important holiday of the year. The young pilgrims had just completed re-enactments of the slaying of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson and revered saint, Imam Hussein, when the Katyusha rocket exploded. Another seven people were critically injured in the attack in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad. It was the second day of violence surrounding the Ashoura holiday, coming on the heels of deadly clashes in the south between security forces and a Shiite cult intent on disrupting the celebration.

Baghdad -- Marching under blood-spattered banners, mourners carried coffins yesterday through streets still littered with pieces of flesh and debris, as the death toll from three consecutive days of attacks on Shiite Muslim pilgrims climbed to 188. At least 30 people were killed in fresh attacks yesterday on some of the more than 1 million pilgrims streaming to the holy city of Karbala for weekend rites commemorating the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of...

BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber blew himself up among Shiite Muslim pilgrims at a crowded rest stop yesterday, part of an eruption of sectarian violence that killed at least 43 people, injured 148 and tarnished one of Shiite Islam's holiest holidays. The bloodshed will put pressure on a truce first declared by a powerful Shiite militia in August. Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr renewed the cease-fire Friday for six more months in a move U.S. and Iraqi officials hope will reinforce recent security gains.

Dec. 21 1620 Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower went ashore for the first time at present-day Plymouth, Mass. 1967 The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft, was released.

Upon my return from a week's vacation this past summer in Tel Aviv, my friends and family appeared visibly impatient as I bragged about the city's beaches (" ... the sand? Like talcum powder!"), fascinating architecture, great shopping, as well as chic restaurants that serve splendid, fresh Mediterranean cuisine and excellent Israeli wines. No sooner did I pause for air, then they quickly interrupted, and always with the same two questions. "Did you feel safe there?" Answer: Yes, completely, despite several vivid reminders of Israel's perilous geopolitical status.