This might mean praise for one’s chosen deity or appreciation for spending time with family or simply a thankfulness for another year of life – and the greatest blessing of the United States is that we all are welcome to celebrate in any fashion that reflects our beliefs.
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It’s called the National Day of Mourning. On that very first thanksgiving celebration, these same ideals brought together people of different backgrounds and beliefs, and every year since, with enduring confidence in the power of faith, love, gratitude, and optimism, this force of unity has sustained us as a people.
Another thing I learned was, Thanksgiving actually did not start in America. This is a celebration of togetherness and focuses on the act of being thankful for everything we have.
“It’s important to help others and it’s also important for all of us to be in a community and share food with family and friends, and we do that too”, she said. United American Indians of New England (UAINE) commemorate a National Day of Mourning rather than a traditional Thanksgiving, reminding us that for many people the arrival of European settlers wasn’t a good thing.
Of course, not all of the settlements in the New World made it. People died from disease, malnutrition, American Indian attacks and bad weather. The Rev. Brenda Adkins, pastor of the His Divine Fellowship Ministry Church, created Day of Joy to put Thanksgiving in a bag to send hundreds of less fortunate people home with a meal.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, let’s talk about its history. But not until 1863, amid the Civil War, did a president, Abraham Lincoln, declare a national Thanksgiving Day to be celebrated each November.
What we do know, according to History.com, is that “in November 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first corn harvest proved successful, Gov. William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit”. Due to the failure of the harvest the previous year half of the pilgrims had starved to death.
The first Thanksgiving was in 1621 in Plymouth. Who among us can not recall a relative or Thanksgiving regular who charged up the dinner conversation with opinions too loud and too poorly formulated? He noticed many small towns across America publicly displayed carefully preserved fragments of Plymouth Rock. One can be traced back to the early 1600s when settlers in MA and Virginia came together to give thanks for their survival, for the fertility of their fields, and for their faith. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday in 1939, in an attempt to boost the economy by giving shoppers more time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This year may well be one of the best ever to remember how many blessings we really have in this great country in spite of its challenges.
The strains in the ties that bind us together as a nation will be felt at many a dinner table today, as families and friends gather to celebrate the holiday and try not to talk politics.
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We could take a lesson from those Pilgrims and Native Americans.
