The only eyewitness account of the 1621 harvest celebration at Plymouth comes from Edward Winslow in a letter published in Mourt’s Relation. After the harvest came in, Governor Bradford sent four men out hunting fowl “that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors.” Then Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, arrived with about ninety men. For three days they were entertained and feasted, and the Wampanoag went out and killed five deer, which they brought back and gave to the governor and others. Winslow wrote that it wasn’t always so plentiful, “yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.” That’s a grateful heart. When God fills your table, you don’t just say thanks. You pull up more chairs.
Chuck Feeney co-founded Duty Free Shoppers in 1960 and became a billionaire. Then he did something almost nobody does. He set up the Atlantic Philanthropies in 1982 and two years later transferred all his business assets into it, and for years he gave the money away in secret. Forbes called him the James Bond of philanthropy. Over four decades he gave away more than $8 billion to education, health, and other causes, including nearly $1 billion to Cornell, the school he attended on the G.I. Bill. He lived simply, and in 2012 he estimated he’d set aside about $2 million for his and his wife’s retirement. In 2020 the foundation closed its doors because it had given everything away. He died in 2023 at 92. He liked to say, “It’s much more fun to give while you are alive than to give when you are dead.”
Johnny Appleseed was a real man named John Chapman, born in Massachusetts in 1774 and raised in a home where he grew a lifelong devotion to the Bible. Around 1800 he planted his first orchard near Franklin, Pennsylvania, using seeds he gathered from cider mills. He became an experienced nurseryman who owned more than 1,200 acres across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. Even though selling seedlings was his business, he gave away nearly as many trees as he sold, and he told Bible stories and encouraged frontier families in their faith everywhere he went. In March 1845, he heard that a fence around one of his orchards near Fort Wayne, Indiana, was down and cattle were getting in. He set off on foot through a snowstorm to save his seedlings, caught pneumonia, and died on March 18, 1845, at 71. He spent his life planting things he’d never see full grown.
In January 1998, six-year-old Ryan Hreljac heard his grade one teacher, Mrs. Prest, explain that people were getting sick and even dying because they had no clean water. Some walked for hours just to get dirty water. Ryan only had to walk ten steps to the drinking fountain. He went home and begged his parents to help. They let him do extra chores, and he worked for four months to earn $70, the amount he thought would build a well. Then he learned a well in Uganda would cost $2,000. He did not quit. He spoke to anyone who would listen, and his first well was built at Angolo Primary School in Uganda. That little project became Ryan’s Well Foundation.
Lottie Moon served as a missionary in China for nearly 40 years. Her letters home kept begging for more workers and more support, and in 1888 Southern Baptist women started a Christmas offering for foreign missions. It began at about $3,000 and grew to more than $82 million by 1993, and it was later named for her. Near the end of her life a terrible famine struck the people she served. She gave them all she had. She wrote, “I hope no missionary will be as lonely as I have been.” Literally starving, she grew weaker and weaker. A nurse started home with her, but Lottie died on Christmas Eve, 1912, aboard ship in the harbor at Kobe, Japan.
