Reading For Thanksgiving: Picture Books That Help Explain Religious Freedom
(ANALYSIS) When we read aloud to young children — ones who cannot yet read for themselves — we are shaping how they learn to look at the world. Charlotte Mason insisted that children must be given living books: Narratives shaped by ideas, not by worksheets or moral shortcuts. As she wrote in “Formation of Character”:
“Why in the world should we not give children, while they are at school, the sort of books they can live upon; books alive with thought and feeling, and delight in knowledge, instead of the miserable cram-books on which they are starved?”
Picture books do this especially well because children encounter ideas through images first — through faces, landforms, gestures and moments that invite them to wonder and ask questions. Sarah Mackenzie captures this in her reminder that “a picture book is an art gallery for the lap” and that “If you want a child to know the truth, tell him the truth. If you want a child to love the truth, tell him a story.”
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In a Thanksgiving season saturated with simplified narratives, these living picture books help us return to something more honest: the layered, contradictory and deeply human stories that shaped the early encounters on this land.
These stories also reflect what Jacqueline Rivers calls enacted religious freedom — people living according to their faith commitments even without naming it as such. The early Wampanoag and Haudenosaunee communities lived their gratitude and reverence in prayer, relationship and care for creation.
Pilgrims left homes and livelihoods for the freedom to order their spiritual lives. Puritans struggled with the contradictions of protecting conscience for some while denying it to others. Children begin to perceive these tensions not through lectures but through story, image, and the practice of attentive listening as we read aloud.
The following four living picture books — each in its own way — offer children a truthful, humane window into what religious freedom looked like when embodied on this land, and how different communities practiced, shared, contradicted or denied it.
“Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun’s Thanksgiving Story” (written by Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry and Alexis Bunten; illustrated by Garry Meeches, Sr.) is a living book told through the wise, steady voice of Weeâchumun — corn herself — and her sisters, Beans and Squash. Together, these “three sisters” narrate how their gifts, along with the help of the wider community of creation, made it possible for the newcomers who arrived in what is now Massachusetts to survive their first harsh seasons and eventually thrive.
The story unfolds not as a myth of settler ingenuity, but as a reminder that the first successful harvest in this “new world” depended on guidance from the land, from its original peoples and from the relationships that hold the natural world together.
Woven throughout the book is a modern-day Wampanoag family whose presence grounds the story in the living continuity of Indigenous memory. In one scene, a young girl sits with her grandmother, her N8hkumuhs, and tries to make sense of the difference between the story she hears at school and the truth carried in her family. “It was Weeâchumun and the other beings of the land, sea, and sky who made the newcomers’ first harvest possible?” she asks, puzzled but hopeful.
Her grandmother affirms her with gentle certainty: “This is why we pray before we eat.”
The book invites readers, children and adults alike, to shift perspective with honesty and generosity: To see Thanksgiving not as a polished tale lifted out of place and people, but as a story rooted in relationships, reciprocity and the living wisdom of the Wampanoag.
In doing so, it offers a quiet lesson in embodied religious freedom — the kind practiced through daily gratitude, right relationship with land and kin and reverence for the more-than-human beings who sustain life. It honors the communities whose care made survival possible and reminds us that spiritual freedom is never abstract; it is lived, prayed, shared, and enacted in the stories we keep and the meals we bless.
“The Thanksgiving Story” (written by Alice Dalgliesh; illustrated by Helen Sewell) is a 1954 Caldecott Honor book and remains one of the gentlest, most enduring living picture books about the early seasons in Plymouth. The New York Times once wrote, “The familiar story is told simply enough for beginning readers but without loss of significance or dignity,” and that is precisely Dalgliesh’s gift: She offers a narrative accessible to children without flattening its complexity or its moral weight.
The story centers on one family — Giles, Constance, and Damaris Hopkins — as they travel aboard the crowded Mayflower, bound for a land they hope will allow them to build a new life. The cramped quarters only shrink further when their baby brother, Oceanus, is born mid-voyage, a reminder that even in storms and uncertainty, life insists on its own arrival.
But the real hardship comes after they reach shore. Hunger, cold, sickness, and grief threaten the small colony and reveal how fragile beginnings can be.
Dalgliesh does not dramatize these hardships; she simply names them in the quiet, steady way that living books do, allowing young readers to feel the weight of what the Hopkins children endured.
And yet the story does not end in despair. The Pilgrims’ survival becomes possible only through the guidance and generosity of the Native peoples whose knowledge of the land — its seasons, soils and sustaining foods — made a first harvest imaginable. With their help, the colonists begin to find their footing in a place that is new to them but already held by deep patterns of life and care.
The book closes on a note of gratitude that is both earnest and theologically grounded. Dalgliesh ends with the community’s minister lifting a prayer of thanksgiving for “security and nourishment and shelter and community in this new land.”
She acknowledges that the Native peoples had their own prayers of thanksgiving, giving thanks to the Creator “who made the trees grow, the corn grow, and all kinds of fruits.” In this small moment, Dalgliesh admits a truth often forgotten in later retellings: that gratitude to God, expressed through communal ritual, was not the property of one people but a shared human practice shaped by different traditions.
And then comes the final line — sentimental, yes, but also carrying a sincerity that reflects the Pilgrims’ best intentions as they understood them: “They were free in this new land. Free to work, to make their homes, to worship God in their own way.” Dalgliesh imagines the gathered community perhaps singing the Doxology they carried across the ocean:
“Praise God from whom all blessings flow,
“Praise Him all creatures here below …”
And if they did, she writes, then Giles, Constance, and Damaris “sang with them” — their young voices joined to a prayer carried by generations, a reminder that even in unfamiliar soil, people root themselves by turning toward the Holy with gratitude and hope.
“Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message” (written by Chief Jake Swamp; illustrated by Erwin Printup, Jr.) is an Indigenous-authored and Indigenous-illustrated living book that does what the best spiritual stories do: It shows gratitude rather than explaining it. The School Library Journal captured this perfectly, calling it “a very valuable suggestion that the giving of thanks should be a daily, rather than a rare, activity.”
The words and images arise from the Thanksgiving Address, an ancient, communal prayer of gratitude offered to Mother Earth and to all the beings who make up the wider community of creation.
The Address originates with the Haudenosaunee, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. These communities live across what is now northern New York and parts of Canada, and the Thanksgiving Address continues to be spoken today by Haudenosaunee peoples and by non-Native friends who have been welcomed into the practice through relationship and trust.
This continuity is deeply personal to me. For each of the ten Thanksgivings I have been married to my husband, my father-in-law has recited the Thanksgiving Address in its entirety to honor his friend, Tuscarora elder Ted Williams, who walked on to the Spirit World some fifteen years ago. His recitation is not performance. It is a gesture of fidelity, a way of carrying forward a teaching entrusted to him by someone he loved. It is, in its own quiet way, a living example of religious and spiritual freedom embodied to give thanks in the language and cadence of another tradition as an act of reverence, kinship and memory.
Chief Jake Swamp’s retelling holds this same spirit. “Thank you, deep blue waters around Mother Earth,” the narrator prays, “for you are the force that takes thirst away from all living things.”
Each page honors another member of creation — waters, winds, plants, animals, the sun, the stars — revealing a world in which gratitude is not episodic but woven into the fabric of daily life.
The book concludes with the simplicity and expansiveness characteristic of the Thanksgiving Address itself:
“And most of all, thank you, Great Spirit, for giving us all these wonderful gifts, so we will be happy and healthy every day and every night.”
In a world that often narrows religious freedom to legal rights or protected categories, this book reminds us that the deepest freedoms are lived with the body — with breath, with voice, with the humble act of offering gratitude to the Creator and to all creation.
“The New Americans: Colonial Times: 1620–1689” (written by Betsy Maestro; illustrated by Giulio Maestro) is a richly detailed, beautifully illustrated picture book that introduces young readers to the layered, often complicated world of early colonial America.
Told through intimate, episodic scenes and warm watercolor illustrations, the book begins with the Indigenous nations who lived across North America for generations before Europeans arrived, rooting children in the land and its original caretakers before following the Pilgrims and Puritans into the story.
The Maestros explain clearly why the Pilgrims fled England: “Unlike the Dutch, who had come to the New World to trade, the Pilgrims had come in search of religious freedom.” At a time when “the practice of other religions was forbidden,” Separatists and dissenting Protestants were forced to worship in secret, living under laws shaped by the Church of England’s authority. The book also introduces the Puritans — those who hoped to remain in the English church but “purify” it.
When these reforms proved impossible at home, many followed the Pilgrims across the Atlantic in search of the freedom to order their spiritual lives according to conscience.
Yet the Maestros do not present this search for liberty as simple or one-directional. They point out the deep irony that “although the Puritans had come to America to find religious freedom, they did not allow for it in their own colony.”
Children meet figures like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, dissenters whose banishment reveals the limits of Puritan tolerance. Their stories highlight the contested nature of religious liberty from the very beginning and how quickly a community that suffers for conscience can deny that same freedom to others.
Throughout the book, Indigenous peoples remain central — never reduced to footnotes or helpers but portrayed as essential neighbors with their own governance, cultures, and spiritual traditions. The Maestros show how Native communities shared knowledge, foodways, and diplomacy with newcomers, even assisting those who left Puritan settlements for reasons of conscience. Young readers see clearly that survival in the early colony depended on these relationships.
Across its 70-year sweep, the book gathers these encounters — cross-cultural, spiritual and political — into a living narrative that children can absorb in meaningful portions. It portrays early America as interwoven and contested, a place where the longing for religious freedom shaped new communities even as they struggled, and often failed, to extend that freedom generously.
Through carefully chosen details and accessible prose, the Maestros offer a picture of colonial life that is both truthful and deeply human, inviting families to reflect on what it means to seek freedom and what it takes to protect it for others.
Reading these living picture books aloud at Thanksgiving allows children to meet the story in its full shape — its beauty, its failures, its moments of generosity, and its deep contradictions. They see people whose faith guided them across an ocean, and people whose spiritual practices had been rooted in this land for generations. They see how these communities helped one another, misunderstood one another, and carried memories that did not match the versions told later.
These books do not resolve that tension, and they are not meant to. They give families a way to tell the truth without collapsing the story into one perspective. Children notice how different peoples prayed, how they understood the land, how they made sense of the sacred, and how those understandings sometimes brought them into relationship and sometimes into conflict. Over time, this becomes part of how they understand religious freedom — not as an idea held at a distance, but as something shaped by the actual choices people made in particular places.
Thanksgiving gatherings often bring together people with different memories, convictions, or ways of expressing gratitude.
These books make room for that. They give families a way to build traditions that acknowledge the complexity rather than trying to soften it. A prayer before a meal, a moment of silence, a reading from one of these stories — any of these can become ways of remembering that we stand in a long line of communities trying, with mixed success, to live according to what they hold sacred.
This kind of reading does not offer easy conclusions. What it does offer is a way of sitting with the past honestly and allowing that honesty to shape how we mark the holiday now. It gives children, and the adults reading with them, a chance to recognize the many strands that have formed this season and to carry that recognition into the practices they choose to keep and pass down.
Chelsea Langston Bombino is a believer in sacred communities, a wife and a mother. She serves as a program officer with the Fetzer Institute and a fellow with the Center for Public Justice.