Thoughts on Thanksgiving: Once Upon a Time and Now

In the United States of America each year on the fourth Thursday off November we celebrate a day of Thanksgiving. It is a National Holiday. This holiday has changed drastically over the more than 300 years that it has been being celebrated. It certainly is not the same as when I was a child, or my parents or grandparents were children and it is far different from what it was in the beginning.

Having a day of feasting and thanks giving, Thanksgiving Day, did not originate here with the Colonist, Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It is a festival with religious significance that they brought with them and a day already celebrated here before the Pilgrims ever set foot in what would later be the United States of America. Thanksgiving Day is not specifically American however. For thousands upon thousands of years various cultures around the world have held these festive days of thanks to their God or gods for the bounty of the harvest and the many other blessings from God, however the culture conceived God to be.

The Christian Thanksgiving Celebration actually begins back in Old Testament times with the Hebrews and the Jewish Holy Days, days ordained by God as holidays or Holy Days for celebrating, bringing thanks and praise to him for his sustenance of man and other blessings. Some of these Thanksgiving Days lasted for a full week with feasting, prayers, song, dance, story telling, all celebrating the God that had made their bounty possible.

Native Americans for hundreds of years before the white man came had celebrated the blessings of Creator and Mother Earth; they too had their Thanksgiving Day with feasting, prayer, praise, song, dance, storytelling and games, a tradition that had been going on long, long before the white man; the European adventurers or colonist ever set foot on these shores. They held a special feast each year after the harvest was in and the men had returned from the hunt to thank Creator and Mother Earth for the bounty that would safely see them through the fallow season when the earth was at rest. During this time of thanksgiving the Native American gave thanks to God and gave to each other, to those less fortunate sharing their bounty so that everyone had sufficient for the lean months ahead.

That first Thanksgiving Day in the autumn following the Pilgrim’s first year in the New World was a combination of the Native American festival of thanks and giving and that of the Pilgrims who had come here to this new land to begin a new life with freedom at its core.