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American Thanksgiving Day

On the fourth Thursday of November, Americans celebrate their Thanksgiving Day festival. It is a day centered on bringing families together for a Thanksgiving Day feast, followed by a long weekend holiday that begins the holiday season leading up to Christmas and the end-of-year celebrations.

It is one of the busiest travel times of the year as American families come together to prepare a feast traditionally including a turkey with all the “trimmings”: stuffing, corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and a great variety of side dishes. Thanksgiving is not only a harvest festival, but also celebrates the arrival of the earliest immigrants to America, and their meeting with Native Americans with whom they celebrated the first Thanksgiving dinner.

Origins of the American Thanksgiving Holiday

The Pilgrims who sailed to America on the Mayflower were religious Separatists who had originally left England for Holland to escape religious persecution, but then left for America after becoming disenchanted with the Dutch way of life. They landed at Plymouth Rock in December of 1620, and passed a devastating winter, losing 46 of the original 102 who landed. But the harvest of 1621 was plentiful, and they celebrated with a three-day feast that included 91 Indians who had helped the Pilgrims to survive their first year.

Various official thanksgiving celebrations are recorded in the decades after this first one, including one in 1676 that recognized a colonist victory over the “heathen natives,” and one in 1777 that included all 13 colonies and commemorated a victory over the British. In 1863, President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving. Congress sanctioned Thanksgiving as a legal holiday on the fourth Thursday in November in 1941.

Canadians celebrate a similar Thanksgiving feast one month earlier — read about Canadian Thanksgiving here.

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