America Celebrates Thanksgiving

It’s a holiday that most Americans embrace. Maybe it has as much to do with a typical four day holiday weekend than the tradition of giving thanks. Maybe it has to do with family gatherings and eating turkey or perhaps it’s the madness of Black Friday. Regardless, the tradition goes back to the very beginning of the English in North America.

Plymouth Colony was the first permanent English colony in New England founded in 1620 and the third permanent English colony in America, after Newfoundland and the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. It was settled by the passengers on the Mayflower at a location that had previously been surveyed and named by Captain John Smith.

The Mayflower trans-Atlantic voyage of September 6 – November 9, 1620, had 102 passengers, 74 male and 28 female, plus a crew headed by Master Christopher Jones. A majority of them became the settlers of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. Of the passengers, 37 were members of a separatist Puritan congregation in Leiden, The Netherlands who were seeking to establish a colony in the New World where they could practice their religion without interference from the English government or church. About half of the passengers died in the first winter from exposure and starvation.

The first Thanksgiving was a harvest celebration held by the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony in 1621 after harvesting their first crop with help from the Wampanoag Indians. It was a three-day joint feast attended by the Pilgrims and members of the Wampanoag tribe, including the Native American chief Massasoit. It was recorded that they shared a meal of wild turkey, waterfowl, venison, fish, and fruits and vegetables.

The first Thanksgiving was a harvest celebration, but the modern Thanksgiving holiday became an annual national holiday in the United States in 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November.

The truth is there is nothing wrong with setting aside a day to give thanks for all we have…