Thanksgiving is one of the most significant American holidays. Each year, It is celebrated by the Americans on the fourth Thursday of November.
On this day, people spend time with their loved ones and express gratitude towards different aspects of life.
Families gather together to enjoy turkey, parades and watch American football. Some of the biggest annual American football games are played on Thanksgiving Day.
Thanksgiving Day can be traced back to the 1621 celebration at the Plymouth Plantation, where the settlers held a harvest feast after a successful growing season.
The Pilgrims faced a terrible winter when they first came to Plymouth and around 46 new settlers, from the original 102, starved to death by the next fall.
The colony received assistance from Native Americans who taught the pilgrims how to grow their own crops or how to survive in the New England environment.
Thanks to the Native Americans, the Pilgrims had a successful harvest and they celebrated it with a feast at which 91 Indians, who had helped the Pilgrims survive their first year, attended. It was America’s first Thanksgiving Festival.
It was described as a three-day feast of lobsters, clams, bass, corn, green vegetables and dried fruits, as well as a “great store of Wild turkeys.”
Thanksgiving spread through the new country and was celebrated on different days by different communities. In 1789, George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November, in honor of the new United States Constitution.
In 1863, Sarah Josepha Hale, after a 40-year campaign of written editorials and letters to governors and presidents, had managed to convince President Abraham Lincoln to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday.
In 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving’s date one week earlier in order to give depression-era merchants more selling days before Christmas.
It was a controversial decision so he changed his mind and a joint resolution was signed by the Congress and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In 1941, Thanksgiving officially became a national holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.