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Revision as of 00:17, 19 January 2007 by 75.36.42.112 (talk) (→Canada)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) For other uses, see Thanksgiving (disambiguation).Thanksgiving, or Thanksgiving 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
Main article: Thanksgiving (United States)Traditional celebration
In the United States, certain kinds of food are traditionally served at Thanksgiving meals. First and foremost, turkey is usually the featured item on any Thanksgiving feast table (so much so that Thanksgiving is sometimes referred to as "Turkey 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 city 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. Several American colonists have personal accounts of the 1621 feast in Massachusetts:
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- "First Thanksgiving". Virginia Tourism Corporation. Retrieved 2006-11-21.