Happy Thanksgiving 2020 Everyone!!!

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Thanksgiving in the United States



Since 1941, Thanksgiving has been held on the fourth Thursday in November, which means that the actual date of the holiday shifts each year. The earliest date that Thanksgiving can occur on is November 22; the latest, November 28.

Interestingly, President Franklin Roosevelt had decided to move Thanksgiving from the fourth Thursday in November to the third Thursday in November back in 1938. However, this was not a very popular move. (Read more about this story below.)

THANKSGIVING AT PLYMOUTH
Prior to the formal establishment of Thanksgiving, harvest festivals had been celebrated for centuries by Native Americans, with colonial services dating back to the late 16th century. The autumnal feasts celebrated the harvest of crops after a season of bountiful growth.

As the story goes, it was in the early 1600s when communities of settlers in both Massachusetts and Virginia came together to give thanks for their survival, for the fertility of their fields, and for their faith. The most widely known early Thanksgiving is that of the Pilgrims in Plimoth, Massachusetts, who shared an autumn harvest feast with the Wampanoag Native Americans in 1621.

This feast, which lasted for three days, is considered the “first” Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. However, there were other recorded ceremonies of thanks on these lands. In 1565, Spanish explorers and the local Timucua tribe St. Augustine, Florida celebrated a mass of thanksgiving. In 1619, British settlers proclaimed a day of thanksgiving when they reached a site known as Berkeley Hundred on the banks of Virginia’s James River.

Of course, the idea of “thanksgiving” for the harvest is as old as time, with records from the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. The Native Americans, too, had a rich tradition of giving thanks at harvesttime feasts long before Europeans appeared on their soil. And well after the Pilgrims, for more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving have been celebrated by individual colonies and states.

HOW DID THE PILGRIMS COME TO SETTLE HERE?
Initially, when certain men and women of Scrooby, England, were persecuted for separating themselves from the Church of England, they, as Pilgrims, fled to Leiden, Holland. Upon the execution of separatist leader James of Barneveld there on May 13, 1619, they realized that Holland was no more free than England and prepared to go to America.

On July 20, 1620, after putting their plans into effect, they asked for the parting words of their beloved pastor, John Robinson. The next day, they boarded the ship Speedwell, anchored where the canal from Leiden then entered the Maas (or Meuse, a river flowing into the North Sea) at Delftshaven, and sailed for Southampton, England.

After some misadventures and more farewells, these brave 102 souls departed on board the Mayflower on September 6, 1620.

The Mayflower arrived at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of a curved peninsula later named Cape Cod, on November 21 and on that day drew up one of the most significant documents of American history, the Mayflower Compact. The Compact was a constitution formed by the people—the beginning of popular government in the world.

They then explored the lands along the bay formed by the peninsula. On December 22, after holding the first town meeting in America to decide where to build their homes, the Pilgrims went onshore at a site now called Plymouth Rock. There, on the shore above the rock, they settled. After 400 years, their descendants and those of the Puritans are still sailing along.

What Ever Happened to the Pilgrims?

The highlights that follow reveal some of what has transpired for the Pilgrims, their Puritan contemporaries, and/or the descendants of both.

1621: over dinner with some of their Native guests, gave thanks for their welfare
1621: built a meetinghouse
1634: forbade wearing gold and silver lace
1639: started a college (Harvard)
1640: set up a printing press
1647: hanged a “witch”
1704: printed the first newspaper, in Boston
1721: were inoculated for smallpox
1776: again declared themselves to be free and independent
1792: no doubt purchased the 1793 first edition of Robert B. Thomas’s Farmer’s Almanac. Today known as The Old Farmer’s Almanac, this book is now in its 229th edition and stands as North America’s oldest continuously published periodical.

THANKSGIVING BECOMES A NATIONAL HOLIDAY

The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was observed for a slightly different reason than celebration of the harvest—it was in honor of the creation of the new United States Constitution! In 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation designating November 26 of that year as a “Day of Publick Thanksgivin” to recognize the role of providence in creating the new United States and the new federal Constitution.

Washington was in his first term as president, and a young nation had just emerged successfully from the Revolution. Washington called on the people of the United States to acknowledge God for affording them “an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.” This was the first time Thanksgiving was celebrated under the new Constitution.

Thanksgiving Becomes a Federal Holiday

While Thanksgiving became a yearly tradition in many communities—celebrated on different months and days that suited them—it was not yet a federal government holiday.

Thomas Jefferson and many subsequent presidents felt that a public religious demonstration of piety was not appropriate for a government type of holiday in a country based in part on the separation of church and state. While religious thanksgiving services continued, there were no further presidential proclamations marking Thanksgiving until the Civil War of the 1860s.


https://www.almanac.com/content/when-thanksgiving-day