Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November. It commemorates the 1621 harvest feast shared between the English Pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts. For over 200 years, individual colonies and states held their own Thanksgiving celebrations until Abraham Lincoln established the national holiday in 1863. Today, Thanksgiving traditions center around cooking and sharing a turkey dinner with family and friends, as well as volunteering in the community.
Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November. It commemorates the 1621 harvest feast shared between the English Pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts. For over 200 years, individual colonies and states held their own Thanksgiving celebrations until Abraham Lincoln established the national holiday in 1863. Today, Thanksgiving traditions center around cooking and sharing a turkey dinner with family and friends, as well as volunteering in the community.
Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November. It commemorates the 1621 harvest feast shared between the English Pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts. For over 200 years, individual colonies and states held their own Thanksgiving celebrations until Abraham Lincoln established the national holiday in 1863. Today, Thanksgiving traditions center around cooking and sharing a turkey dinner with family and friends, as well as volunteering in the community.
Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November. It commemorates the 1621 harvest feast shared between the English Pilgrims and Wampanoag Native Americans in Plymouth, Massachusetts. For over 200 years, individual colonies and states held their own Thanksgiving celebrations until Abraham Lincoln established the national holiday in 1863. Today, Thanksgiving traditions center around cooking and sharing a turkey dinner with family and friends, as well as volunteering in the community.
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Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday in the United States, and
Thanksgiving 2020 occurs on Thursday, November 26. In 1621, the
Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. It wasn’t until 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November.
History
In September 1620, a small ship called the Mayflower left Plymouth,
England, carrying 102 passengers—an assortment of religious separatists seeking a new home where they could freely practice their faith and other individuals lured by the promise of prosperity and land ownership in the New World. After a treacherous and uncomfortable crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are now commonly known, began the work of establishing a village at Plymouth.
Throughout that first brutal winter, most of the colonists remained on
board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy and outbreaks of contagious disease. Only half of the Mayflower’s original passengers and crew lived to see their first New England spring. In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from an Abenaki Native American who greeted them in English
In November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved
successful, Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Now remembered as American’s “first Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving Traditions and Rituals
In many American households, the Thanksgiving celebration has lost
much of its original religious significance; instead, it now centers on cooking and sharing a bountiful meal with family and friends. Turkey, a Thanksgiving staple so ubiquitous it has become all but synonymous with the holiday, may or may not have been on offer when the Pilgrims hosted the inaugural feast in 1621.
Today, however, nearly 90 percent of Americans eat the bird—whether
roasted, baked or deep-fried—on Thanksgiving, according to the National Turkey Federation. Other traditional foods include stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Volunteering is a common Thanksgiving Day activity, and communities often hold food drives and host free dinners for the less fortunate.
In conclusion Thanksgiving is important because it’s a positive and
secular holiday where we celebrate gratitude, something that we don’t do enough of these days. It’s also a celebration of the fall harvest. Historically, Thanksgiving has been an annual holiday observed in both the United States and Canada.
