Thanksgiving is an annual national holiday in the United States and Canada that celebrates the blessings of the past year.
It is an annual national holiday in the United States and Canada that celebrates the harvest and other blessings of the past year. Americans generally believe that their Thanksgiving is modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag people. The American holiday is particularly rich in legend and symbolism, and the traditional fare of the Thanksgiving meal typically includes turkey, bread stuffing, potatoes, cranberries, and pumpkin pie. With respect to vehicular travel, the holiday is often the busiest of the year, as family members gather with one another.- Britannica
In both Canada and America, family and friends gather for a meal and other celebrations on Thanksgiving. Traditional fare in America often includes turkey, cranberries, and pumpkin pie. Parades and football games also have long associations with Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving Day to promote unity.
Thanksgiving became a time to gather together. The holiday moved away from its religious roots to allow immigrants of every background to participate in a common tradition. Thanksgiving Day football games, beginning with Yale versus Princeton in 1876, enabled fans to add some rowdiness to the holiday. In the late 1800s parades of costumed revelers became common. In 1920 Gimbel’s department store in Philadelphia staged a parade of about 50 people with Santa Claus at the rear of the procession. Since 1924 the annual Macy’s parade in New York City has continued the tradition, with huge balloons since 1927. The holiday associated with Pilgrims and Native Americans has come to symbolize intercultural peace, America’s opportunity for newcomers, and the sanctity of home and family. -Britannica
Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday in the United States, and Thanksgiving 2024 occurs on Thursday, November 28. In 1621, the Plymouth colonists from England and the Native American Wampanoag people shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies.
For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. It wasn’t until 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November. But the holiday is not without controversy. Many Americans—including people of Native American ancestry—believe Thanksgiving celebrations mask the true history of oppression and bloodshed that underlies the relationship between European settlers and Native Americans.
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For some scholars, the jury is still out on whether the feast at Plymouth really constituted the first Thanksgiving in the United States. Indeed, historians have recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America that predate the Pilgrims’ celebration.
In 1565, for instance, the Spanish explorer Pedro Menéndez de Avilé invited members of the local Timucua tribe to a dinner in St. Augustine, Florida, after holding a mass to thank God for his crew’s safe arrival. On December 4, 1619, when 38 British settlers reached a site known as Berkeley Hundred on the banks of Virginia’s James River, they read a proclamation designating the date as “a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.” -History
Coinciding with the National Day of Mourning, Un-Thanksgiving Day is a similar event held on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Beginning in 1975, Un-Thanksgiving Day serves to commemorate the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz and promote Native American rights.
Protesting Thanksgiving Day and its colonialist sentiments, Un-Thanksgiving Day calls to light the genocide and destruction of Native American society and life that began upon the European settlement of North America. Challenging the traditional narrative of Thanksgiving Day, Un-Thanksgiving Day serves to dispel the notion that European arrival to North America was something worth celebrating. -University of Massachusetts Lowell
However, in recent years, the name has changed from Un-Thanksgiving to Indigenous Peoples Thanksgiving Sunrise Gathering on Alcatraz Island.
The tradition started in 1975, six years after Indigenous activists occupied Alcatraz Island to claim the place that was promised in one of several treaties, later broken by the federal government.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American in a presidential cabinet secretary, spoke on the island last Saturday celebrating Indigenous accomplishments to mark the 52nd anniversary of the groundbreaking occupation.
The myth of Thanksgiving is that the Wampanoags welcomed pilgrims 400 years ago with open arms to feast in peace with the pioneers. But as historians recount, it was an uneasy alliance for the tribe. They tried to stay protected from a rival tribe by aligning with the settlers, even though earlier European arrivals had brought diseases that decimated most of the local Indigenous population. Colonists took over more land and resources, eventually leading to a war that devastated the Wampanoag and empowered European settlers.
“This is a continuing movement to recognize the Indigenous people of California that were almost invisible at first,” said Andrea Carmen, IITC executive director. “This is a chance to highlight truth in history and validate the reality of Indigenous peoples’ experience of genocide here. It’s a chance to affirm our unity.”
Carmen, a Yaqui Native American, said the program hasn’t changed much through the years but has grown tremendously in size from what was originally a few dozen people when she began attending in the 1980s. -The San Francisco Examiner
The 1621 Thanksgiving celebration marked the Pilgrims’ first autumn harvest, so it is likely that the colonists feasted on the bounty they had reaped with the help of their Native American neighbors. Local vegetables that likely appeared on the table include onions, beans, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, carrots and perhaps peas. Corn, which records show was plentiful at the first harvest, might also have been served, but not in the way most people enjoy it now. In those days, the corn would have been removed from the cob and turned into cornmeal, which was then boiled and pounded into a thick corn mush or porridge that was occasionally sweetened with molasses.
Fruits indigenous to the region included blueberries, plums, grapes, gooseberries, raspberries, and, of course, cranberries, which Native Americans ate and used as a natural dye. The Pilgrims might have been familiar with cranberries by the first Thanksgiving, but they wouldn’t have made sauces and relishes with the tart orbs. That’s because the sacks of sugar that traveled across the Atlantic on the Mayflower were nearly or fully depleted by November 1621. Cooks didn’t begin boiling cranberries with sugar and using the mixture as an accompaniment for meats until about 50 years later.- History
