It’s a strange irony that we in New Zealand and our colonial cousins in the United States should celebrate two adjacent holidays in such disparate ways. Our Queen’s Birthday holiday features gongs for new Knights, Dames, companions, members and officers of orders ancient and modern. It’s a strange hankering for the trappings of mother England and the restitution of a Clayton’s aristocracy.

By contrast, the United States will bring out flags for the celebration of Independence Day (July 4) when, according to their own spin, “on July 4, 1776 we claimed our independence from Britain and democracy was born. Every day thousands leave their homeland to come to the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ so they can begin their American dream.” No mention there of knighthoods, titular honours or reversion to their English heritage.

Yet both they and we sprang from British stock, wedded to indigenous peoples who already occupied the lands to which our colonial forebears came. In the case of the United States that colonial marriage will be acknowledged on Independence Day but celebrated primarily on Thanksgiving Day, the fourth Thursday in November.

It’s a holiday that dates back to 1621, the year after the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts, determined to exercise their faith without Establishment interference. Faced with the rigours of a North American winter in which about half of them died, they sought help from the neighbouring indigenous people, the Indians, who taught them to plant corn and other crops.

The next autumn’s plentiful harvest inspired the new Pilgrims to give thanks to God by holding a feast. So Thanksgiving was born and became a national tradition and, along with Independence Day, a celebration of “the land of the free.”

Nick Bunker’s book Making Haste from Babylon – The Pilgrim Fathers and their World, offers a sweeping historical review of the background to that historic voyage and to the world in which they found themselves on their arrival in the New England of their dreams. The New York Times reviewer finds the volume’s detail fatiguing but recognises Bunker’s account is a stunning work.

In a publisher’s interview, Bunker himself describes the year 1620 as the 17th century equivalent of 1931, “a period in which life was hard and getting harder. From the Baltic to the Mediterranean, millions were forced to go on the road moving back and forth in search of something better: not just Puritans but also Gypsies, Jews and Irish exiles and a vast multitude of anonymous peasants, driven off their soil by war, taxes and bankruptcy. The voyage of the Mayflower was simply the most famous of many migrations in a world of trauma. It ceases to be a quaint children’s tale. Instead the Mayflower becomes a symbol of the experience of migrants of all kinds.”

This ancient piece of American history enters our New Zealand 21st century world when Bunker describes one of the early influences that shaped the Mayflower enterprise. It’s an event to which Christchurch will immediately relate.

“Easter week in 1580 was hot, unseasonably so. On Wednesday, April 6 at six o’clock the English were eating, drinking, or at play. If they were devout they were at church. Suddenly on the south coast people heard a detonation like a cannon. Before the noise died away the ground began to move under the impact of the most severe earthquake to strike England for more than a century. Some, like the lawyers in the Inns of Court panicked, and ran into the streets. Only two people died, damage was modest and although it was low on the Richter scale, in the Elizabethan mind, the tremor became another dreadful warning of punishment for sin.”

To the Separatists and Puritans, this event along with other more significant forces triggered off a chain reaction that was finally to end up in the Pilgrim Fathers’ exodus to the Promised Land.

Bunker comments: “In the reaction to events such as the earthquake, we find a Mayflower mentality developing, a state of mind in which some men and women might feel compelled to seek radical alternatives to the status quo.”

He rightly warns: “In looking at all the historical sources of these events we have been obliged to abandon any yearning for moral fables in the past. Trying to find lessons for the present day is more likely to block the process of understanding than to help it on its way. History is not a stage upon which we are entitled to act out the dramas of our own transitory period.”

Noting the warning it must be said nevertheless, that in one sentence, with its conclusion that “some men and women might feel compelled to seek radical alternatives to the status quo,” the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers slides from 1620 into 2011.

Whether it’s Christchurch facing the huge task of redeveloping the city, their churches, their businesses, indeed their lives or, at the more personal level at which we all live, where events and circumstances can so easily turn our dreams to rubble and our hopes to ashes, we all face the challenge the Mayflower pilgrims faced. Will we resignedly settle for the status quo or see, in life’s upheavals, the possibility of radical alternatives?

• Tom Cadman looks at life and faith through the lens of literature