More To Be Thankful For

More To Be Thankful For

Nov - 16 | No Comments.

Filed Under : A Random Thought

Thanksgiving is one week from today. Before you start thinking about everything you’re going to eat, take a moment to review what Thanksgiving is really all about. Before there were frozen turkeys, football, and cool-whip, there were Pilgrims and Indians. Without them, we wouldn’t get to stuff ourselves silly once a year and have a four day weekend. Perhaps we should give thanks to them.

*The English colonists we call Pilgrims celebrated days of thanksgiving as part of their religion. But these were days of prayer, not days of feasting. Our national holiday really stems from the feast held in the autumn of 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to celebrate the colony’s first successful harvest. Teacher Scholastic

*The Pilgrims would not have called the event of 1621 a “Thanksgiving.” The Separatist Puritans recognized three kinds of holidays as sanctioned by the Bible: the Sabbath, days of thanksgiving, and fast days. Unlike the Sabbath, days of thanksgiving and fast days were not part of the established calendar. They were proclaimed by the governor only in response to a specific situation. A religious day of fasting could be invoked by a drought or war. A religious day of thanksgiving could be called to celebrate a particularly good harvest or providential rainfall. Although the event of 1621 is known today as the “First Thanksgiving,” that harvest feast had many secular elements and would not have been considered a religious day of thanksgiving by the Pilgrims. PilgrimHall.org