<img class="alignleft" src="https://judythewriter.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/tgd3.jpg" width="336" height="444" />Thanksgiving arrives on Thursday making this week filled with family reunions, food, fun, travel, football games, Black Friday, and being thankful.

Not necessarily in that order.

The way we celebrate today things is quite different from how Pilgrims celebrated Thanksgiving feasts.

Historically, Pilgrims in The Commonwealth of Virginia held Thanksgiving services beginning in 1607. Days of prayer, not days of feasting, but services deeply grounded in religious beliefs and gratitude to their Heavenly Father.

<a href="http://www.scholastic.com/scholastic_thanksgiving/feast/">Our national holiday really stems from the feast held in the autumn of 1621</a> by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to celebrate the colony's first successful harvest. The History Channel website states that, “the colonists didn’t even call the day Thanksgiving. To them, a thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific event, such as the winning of a battle. On such a religious day, the types of recreational activities that the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians participated in during the 1621 harvest feast – dancing, singing secular songs, playing games – wouldn’t have been allowed. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims’ minds.”

The way celebrate became an annual tradition with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_%28United_States%29">Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation</a> of a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

How we celebrate today resembles that feast of 1621 because the basis for Thanksgiving is thankfulness.

As you go about the preparations for your celebration, spend some time thinking about the origins of the holiday and all the reasons you have to be thankful.
<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #ff6600;">Happy Thanksgiving!</span></h2>