Parentella

My personal blog has a lot of international readers. Last year, I wrote about the history of Thanksgiving and how it is celebrated in the US since I knew many of our readers were curious. Parentella.com also has many international readers, so I thought I would share an excerpt from the post:

“Thanksgiving is probably the biggest holiday of the year in our country. Since it is a cultural holiday, not a religious one, most everyone celebrates it. It is one of the few days of the year that almost all stores and businesses close. The purpose of the holiday is to take a day to count your blessings in life. The tradition is for people to gather together with loved ones, usually extended family, and eat a huge meal. The traditional meal usually includes baked turkey with stuffing, cranberry sauce, yams, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie and apple pie—foods harvested in the autumn months.

There are many folk stories about the “first” Thanksgiving that swirl about, but most of them involve the pilgrims (first European settlers in America) and Indians (Native Americans) celebrating a bountiful harvest together in the early 1600’s. All of these various  joint celebration stories are probably all partly true.

The fact of the matter was that both people groups had been holding harvest celebrations for centuries. While the pilgrims were mostly Christians, they still followed an Old Testament command to hold an annual celebration each Autumn to thank the Lord for blessing them with an abundant harvest (the Jews call this tradition Sukkot and still practice it). Likewise, most of the indigenous American tribes had a similar tradition of celebrating the end of the harvest season with feasting and ceremonial dancing. It seems likely the two groups would have combined their respective celebrations into one, and in more than one town.

For another 200 years, Thanksgiving was a popular but informal holiday, celebrated by most towns each autumn, on whatever day suited the town best. In 1789, George Washington (the United State’s first president) declared Thanksgiving an officially recognized holiday to be celebrated in October, and every state picked a different day within the month to celebrate. In 1863, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was looking for a way to unite the country. He decided to take the popular Thanksgiving holiday and expand it, declaring it a national holiday to be celebrated the last Thursday in November.”

We know that several other countries/cultures celebrate a similar tradition of Thanksgiving. We’d like to hear from you! Please post a comment telling us about what kind of customs your culture partakes in.

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Christi Grab is Parentella’s Editorial Director and author of  The Unexpected Circumnavigation: Unusual Boat, Unusual People Part 1 – San Diego to Australia.  She is currently working on book two of the series.