… to bring you the following message about The HISTORY OF THANKSGIVING!
On December 13, 1621 our Pilgrim forefathers held the first day of a three-day feast celebrating their survival and the establishment of a colony in the new land (following their harsh landing in North America in 1620 and the winter that followed, in which many of the colonists died of sickness and starvation). The feast represented the first Thanksgiving Festival in the United States, and set the stage for the holiday to come.
In 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation declaring the first U.S. “day of Thanksgiving to God” under the new Constitution. Following the President’s proclamation, the Protestant Episcopal Church officially declared the first Thursday in November a “regular day for giving thanks.” Other thanksgiving celebrations occurred throughout the United States, with the date chosen on a state-by state basis.
Many years later the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Mrs. Sarah Joseph Hale, decided to promote the idea of a national Thanksgiving celebration. She wrote to President Abraham Lincoln (repeatedly) suggesting the idea. Lincoln agreed (though several of his predecessors in office, also contacted by the tenacious Mrs. Hale, declined to establish the requested holiday). In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a formal proclamation establishing a national day of Thanksgiving, to be celebrated each year on the last Thursday in November. Congress subsequently ratified the proclamation and declared the official national Thanksgiving holiday – in 1941.
Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation (full text can be found – and should be read! – here) establishes Thanksgiving as a holiday wherein and whereby each and every person in the United States can step back from daily life and spend a day in appreciation of the great and wonderful gifts God has granted to this nation and its people.
Lincoln’s invitation says it far better than I:
” I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.”
We need this day no less in 2007 than we did in 1941, in 1863 or in 1621. We need it more than turkey or stuffing or even apple pie.
May God bless our nation, our people and our lives. For the blessings we have and those we have yet to receive, may the LORD make us truly grateful.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Trackposted to Pirate’s Cove, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, and The World According to Carl, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
Thanksgiving facts courtesy of ChristianAnswers.net
