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- Holiday Origins
- Thanksgiving Day is a harvest festival celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada. Thanksgiving was a holiday to express thankfulness, gratitude, and appreciation to God, family and friends for which all have been blessed of material possessions and relationships. Traditionally, it has been a time to give thanks for a bountiful harvest.
- 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.
- During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress designated one or more days of thanksgiving a year, and in 1789 George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the national government of the United States; in it, he called upon Americans to express their gratitude for the happy conclusion to the country's war of independence and the successful ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
- In 1817, New York became the first of several states to officially adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday;
- In 1827, the noted magazine editor and prolific writer Sarah Josepha Hale author, among countless other things, of the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb launched a campaign to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. For 36 years, she published numerous editorials and sent scores of letters to governors, senators, presidents and other politicians.
Abraham Lincoln finally heeded her request in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, in a proclamation entreating all Americans to ask God to commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife and to heal the wounds of the nation.
He scheduled Thanksgiving for the final Thursday in November, and it was celebrated on that day every year until 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in an attempt to spur retail sales during the Great Depression. Roosevelt's plan, known derisively as Franksgiving, was met with passionate opposition, and in 1941 the president reluctantly signed a bill making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November.
- Why Thanksgiving?
- It makes no sense to be thankful unless there is an object to which the thanks is given.
- Life is a Gift.
- Provision - the providing or supplying of something, esp. of food or other necessities.
- What do you have that was not given to you?
- Unthankfulness and Unholiness go together
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. - |
- Be Thankful!
That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all your wondrous works. - |
And out of them shall proceed thanksgiving and the voice of them that make merry: and I will multiply them, and they shall not be few; I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small. - |
Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. - |
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