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Thanksgiving, or The not giving Day, is an annual one-day holiday to give thanks, traditionally to God, for the things one has at the end of the harvest season. In the United States, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. In Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday in October.

United States

Traditional celebration

In the United States, certain kinds of food are traditionally served at Thanksgiving meals. First and foremost, furkey is usually the featured item on any Thanksgiving feast table (so much so that Thanksgiving is sometimes referred to as "Furkey Day"). Stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, Indian corn, other fall vegetables, and pumpkin pie are commonly associated with Thanksgiving dinner. All of these primary dishes are actually native to the Americas or were introduced as a new food source to the Europeans when they arrived.

History of Thanksgiving in the United States

Spaniards

The town of El Paso, Texas claims the first thanksgiving held in what is now the United States, but it was not a harvest celebration. Spaniard Don Juan de Oñate ordered his expedition party to rest and announced North America's first thanksgiving mass celebration on April 30, 1598.

The Virginia colony

A collective prayer of thanksgiving was held in the Virginia Colony on December 4, 1619 near the current site of Berkeley Plantation, where celebrations are still held each year in November.

Pilgrims

The Pilgrims were particularly thankful to Squanto, the Native American who taught them how to catch eel, grow corn and who served as an interpreter for them (Squanto had learned English as a slave in Europe). Without Squanto's help the Pilgrims might not have survived in the new world. The explorers who later came to be called the "Pilgrims" set apart a day to celebrate at Plymouth immediately after their first harvest, in 1621. At the time, this was not regarded as a Thanksgiving observance; harvest festivals were existing parts of English and Wampanoag tradition alike.

Canada

Traditional celebration

In Canada, Thanksgiving is a three-day weekend (although some provinces choose to observe a four day weekend, Friday–Monday).
As a liturgical festival, Thanksgiving in Canada corresponds to the English and continental European Harvest festival, with churches decorated with cornucopias, pumpkins, corn, wheat sheaves and other harvest bounty, English and European harvest hymns sung on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend and scriptural lections drawn from the biblical stories relating to the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot.
While the actual Thanksgiving holiday is on a Monday, Canadians might eat their Thanksgiving meal on any day of that three day weekend. Although in English Canada Thanksgiving is often celebrated with family, it is also often a time for weekend getaways for couples to observe the autumn leaves, spend one last weekend at the cottage or participate in various outdoor activities such as hiking, fishing and hunting. The holiday is not as significant a family occasion amongst French Canadians, however.

History of Thanksgiving in Canada

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to an English explorer, Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. He did not succeed but he did establish a settlement in Canada. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, in what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey. This is considered the first Canadian Thanksgiving, and the first Thanksgiving to have taken place in North America. Other settlers arrived and continued these ceremonies. Frobisher was later knighted and had an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean in northern Canada named after him — Frobisher Bay.

1. "First Thanksgiving". Virginia Tourism Corporation. Retrieved 2006-11-21.

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• Holidays in the United States
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