Enlarge Collection of the St. Augustine Historical Society Spanish flavor: An engraving depicts the first Catholic Mass held in St. Augustine on Sept. 8, 1565.  Enlarge Plimoth Plantation Pilgrims' progress: This vintage postcard of the New England Thanksgiving features pumpkin, apple and turkey. Robyn Gioia believes bean soup was on the Florida menu.  GIVING THANKS -- WITH A TWIST Want to do Turkey Day the Lebanese way? Get the recipe for Cocido, a Spanish dish from first Thanksgiving How do USA TODAY readers put an ethnic twist on Thanksgiving? QUIZ: Test your Turkey Day trivia skills

Gioia is a wife, mother and teacher, and her green eyes twinkle when she talks about her fifth-grade students at the Bolles School just north of here in Ponte Vedra.

But Gioia, 53, has written a children's book, and just the title is enough to peeve any Pilgrim: America's REAL First Thanksgiving.

"It was the publisher who put real in capital letters," she says, "but I think it's great."

What does REAL mean? Well, she's not talking turkey and cranberry sauce. She's talking a Spanish explorer who landed here on Sept. 8, 1565, and celebrated a feast of thanksgiving with Timucua Indians. They dined on bean soup.

If you do the math, it is 56 years before the Pilgrims sat down and shared a meal with natives at Plymouth Rock.

Who knew? Not even Gioia, until she attended a teachers' workshop two years ago and heard Michael Gannon, a retired history scholar from the University of Florida, tell the story of Pedro Menendez de Aviles.

Gannon, 80, first laid out the premise of an earlier Thanksgiving in his scholarly book The Cross in the Sand in 1965, but few picked up on it. He says his mention of Menendez's meal was a "throwaway line that lay fallow for 20 years."

That was, until a reporter for the Associated Press in 1985 exposed Gannon's academic findings to the world, which caused what Gannon remembers as "a storm of interest. I was on the phone for three days straight."

Traditionalists, especially in New England, dubbed him "The Grinch who stole Thanksgiving."

Gannon took it with good humor.

"I became rather famous at the time for saying that by the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal."

Gannon thinks the word is finally, but slowly, getting out, but he's well aware that the victors write the history books. And history, once written, is hard to change.

"The English wrote the history and established the traditions," he says. "That's life. Get over it."

But Gioia believes the rising Hispanic population in America could spark interest in the nation's Spanish heritage and by association, Gannon's findings.

Meanwhile, Gioia is firing the next shot across the Mayflower's bow.

After Gannon's talk, she thought an illustrated book was the perfect way to tell the first Thanksgiving story to her students. It seems to have worked. With them, at least.

When Gioia recently asked her students who believes the first Thanksgiving was in Florida, every hand in her classroom flew up in the air.

Off the page and into the kitchen

Gioia, who serves her own family bean soup on the Sept. 8 anniversary, has her work cut out for her elsewhere, however. Even on the site where Menendez's Thanksgiving feast is believed to have been held.

"I always thought the first Thanksgiving was at Plymouth Rock," says Betty McDaniel, a gift-shop clerk at the Ponce de Leon Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, which sits next door to Nombre de Dios Mission, where Menendez landed and celebrated with the natives after a Catholic Mass.

John Fraser owns the "Fountain of Youth" attraction and calls the where-was-the-first-Thanksgiving brouhaha "a ticklish issue."

"The people from the North just wouldn't believe it," he says when the idea of a Spanish Thanksgiving first surfaced in the press. "They just couldn't get it through their heads."

Martha Hird, a colleague of Fraser's at the site, thinks it might be as much Floridians' fault as anyone else.

"We just haven't had enough people to jump up and down and publish more books about this," she says.

Susan Parker, executive director of the St. Augustine Historical Society, says there's more to it than just getting the word out. She agrees with Gannon that written history is hard to change and adds that traditional accounts of America's past often come with "a Protestant twist," as that was the predominant culture.

"There's a tradition of diminishing the Catholic presence of our early history," Parker says.

But it also doesn't help that there's virtually no mention of the Thanksgiving feast anywhere in town. Not on the historic marker at the Menendez landing site —Tradition holds that the first Mass in the new colony was celebrated here — and not at the Government House Museum at the downtown Visitors Center. In 1565 Menendez established St. Augustine, named for the feast day on which he sighted land.

Not a word about Thanksgiving.

Bill Adams, director of Heritage Tourism for the City of St. Augustine, says people need to understand that much has happened in America's oldest city in the past four centuries.

"We're covering 400 years of history in the museum, and there are a lot of events we need to focus on. … We have so many firsts here, it's just one of the many."

He then voiced a sentiment of many St. Augustinians. "We're constantly overlooked and ignored … and we do a lousy job of marketing."

Gannon agrees that St. Augustinians are "somewhat reluctant to engage in such arguments" and are unsure about getting their facts straight.

"It's an area we need to work on," says Gioia. "Everyone I talk to doesn't know about it."

Or doesn't buy it. And that includes the city's tour guides.

Robert Makin drives an Old Town Trolley through St. Augustine, reciting the town's storied history. At Stop 17, the Menendez landing site, he talks about the founding of America's first permanent settlement but mentions nothing about a Thanksgiving feast.

"Well, it's very arguable," he says when asked. "I also don't think they called it Thanksgiving," he says. "You can't even call it Thanksgiving if it's not even English. Thanksgiving is an English word."

He then shrugged his shoulders as he drove on. "It's fine if they want to think that, I guess. It really doesn't matter."

Tourists who wander through the shops on St. George Street in St. Augustine's historic downtown are equally confused.

Did Jennifer Fagan, a banker from Dayton, Ohio, know she was visiting the site of America's first Thanksgiving?

"No, I'm surprised," she says. "We just assumed it's Plymouth Rock. You learn something new every day."

Her son, Evan, makes turkeys and Pilgrim hats in school, she says. And that's a key factor.

"What anyone did in fifth grade is probably what they think of as Thanksgiving," says the historical society's Parker. "So when you're 30, that's what you think is Thanksgiving."

Reclaiming local history

Not that the idea hasn't gained some traction here.

Herbie Wiles, a retired insurance executive in St. Augustine, who played Menendez in the annual September re-enactment this year, buys the first Thanksgiving story.

"From what I can gather from Mike Gannon, who is very thorough, there was a Thanksgiving meal. And I think Menendez had sense enough to realize he had to work with these Indians. He was greatly outnumbered."

Wiles didn't make it to "the lunch," as he called it, which followed the re-enactment ceremony, but he says he will next year. "I now see the need to coordinate the Mass and the meal."

The folks at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, site of the 1621 Thanksgiving, acknowledge that most people visit their site with the belief that it's the birthplace of Thanksgiving.

"Plimoth Plantation prides itself in peeling back the layers on America's favorite holiday, but we never claim we held the first Thanksgiving," says Jennifer Monac, referring instead to the fact it's a national holiday decreed by Abraham Lincoln.

She's not sure any place can stake such a claim.

"What people celebrate today as Thanksgiving is pretty much a myth. It's nothing like what the people in Plymouth or Jamestown or St. Augustine, for that matter, celebrated."

So there.

Please pass the cranberry sauce.

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Enlarge By Oscar Sosa for USA TODAY Rocking the boat: Robyn Gioia maintains that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated in St. Augustine, Fla.