Thanksgiving
is a national holiday in the United States.
It is celebrated each year on the fourth Thursday in November. The day
was originally set aside as a time when families gather together giving thanks
to God for the year’s blessings. In many
homes, a large dinner, usually consisting of roast turkey or ham is served as
the main course. Accompanying the meal
are many side dishes and desserts.
Thanksgiving is traditionally a harvest festival.
A small
ship, Mayflower, set sail from Plymouth, England, on September 16, 1620. The passengers spent 66 days in the hold of
the ship arriving on November 21. Most
of them were Puritans who had been persecuted for their religious beliefs in
England. One month later, on December
26, all 102 passengers set foot on land and began to establish the colony of
Plymouth. The Pilgrims, as these people
came to be called, had borrowed money from a group of English merchants to
cross the Atlantic Ocean and start a settlement in the Virginia Colony
(USA). But during the long voyage,
storms blew their crowded little vessel off course.
After
sailing for more than two months, the Mayflower finally reached land near, what
is now Provincetown, on Cape Cod. An Englishman named Captain John Smith had
explored this part of the American coast (New England) several years
earlier. The Pilgrims followed Smith's
maps and sailed across Cape Cod Bay to the mainland coast of
Massachusetts.
They
founded the Colony of Plymouth in December 1620. Most of the Pilgrims had
suffered terribly from the long voyage.
They immediately began to build shelters, but soon they were overcome by
a local sickness. Through the course of
the winter 46 died, nearly half their original number.
The
Mayflower had been a cargo ship and had to be refitted to handle the Pilgrim
passengers. It had three masts and a
double deck. No one is sure of what
happened to the original Mayflower after it returned to England the following
April. A replica of the original
Mayflower was built in England in the mid-1950's. This ship, Mayflower II, sailed across the
Atlantic in 1957 to commemorate the Pilgrim's voyage. It is now anchored in Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts.
The first
American Thanksgiving is thought to have taken place in New England. The Pilgrim settlers, who established
Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1620, were the first to celebrate it. The Pilgrims had struggled bravely through a
grim winter with much sickness and little food.
The following spring, friendly Indians helped the settlers to plant
corn, and in the autumn, the first crop was harvested. Governor William Bradford proclaimed three
days of prayer and thanksgiving. The
Pilgrims gave a huge feast and invited the Indian Chief, Massosoit, and 90 of
his people.
The
custom of observing a special harvest thanksgiving day spread throughout the
other colonies in the years that followed.
After the American Revolution various states continued the custom each
one naming its own day for giving thanks.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the first national
Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday in November. The present date was
established by Congress in 1941.
Original
article by Larry James, revised by J. Bruce Sofia
