Thanksgiving (United States)

Thanksgiving (United States)

Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in the United States, celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. It originated as a harvest festival, and the centerpiece of Thanksgiving celebrations remains Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner traditionally consists of foods and dishes indigenous to the Americas, namely turkey, potatoes, squash, corn, green beans, cranberries and pumpkin pie.

About Thanksgiving (United States) in brief

Summary Thanksgiving (United States)Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in the United States, celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. It originated as a harvest festival, and the centerpiece of Thanksgiving celebrations remains Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner traditionally consists of foods and dishes indigenous to the Americas, namely turkey, potatoes, squash, corn, green beans, cranberries and pumpkin pie. Other Thanksgiving customs include charitable organizations offering Thanksgiving dinner for the poor, attending religious services, watching parades, and viewing football games. In American culture Thanksgiving is regarded as the beginning of the fall–winter holiday season, which includes Christmas and the New Year. The most prominent historic thanksgiving event in American popular culture is the 1621 celebration at the Plymouth Plantation, where the settlers held a harvest feast after a successful growing season. In 1619, 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia. The group’s London Company charter specifically required that the day of our ships arrival in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God. Thanksgiving services were routine in what became the Commonwealth of Virginia as early as 1607, with the first permanent settlement of Jamestown, Virginia holding a thanksgiving in 1610. The exact time is unknown, but James Baker, president of the Plimoth Plantation said in 1996, \”The event occurred between May 21 and Nov 11, 1621, along with four adult women who survived their first winter in the New World along with the four young Pilgrim women.

It included 50 people who were cooked by the Mayflower and 90 Native Americans who survived the winter. It followed the harvest, rather it followed the observance of the Thanksgiving, rather than it followed it. Seventeenth-century accounts do not identify this as a Thanksgiving observance. It is most likely being around the time of the most traditional time, the most likely time being around Sept. 15, 1620. The feast lasted three days, and—as recounted by Edward Winslow— was attended by 90 Wampanoag and 53 Pilgrims. The Plymouth settlers, known as Pil Grims, had settled in land abandoned when all but one of the Patuxet Indians died in a disease outbreak. After a harsh winter killed half of the Plymouth settlers. The last surviving Patuxett, Tisquantum, more commonly known by the diminutive variant Squanto, came in at the request of Samoset, the first Native American to encounter the Pilgrim. Squanto taught the Pil Grim how to catch eel and grow corn and served as an interpreter for them until he too succumbed to the disease a year later. In 1789, President George Washington made Thanksgiving a national holiday. On January 6, 1885, an act by Congress made Thanksgiving, and other federal holidays, a paid holiday for all federal workers throughout the U.S. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the date was moved to one week earlier, observed between 1939 and 1941 amid significant controversy.