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From: "Paul Hollinghurst" <>
Subject: [NCDOGS] Happy Thanksgiving - Correction!
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 02:20:07 -0500


Correction! I forgot the Copyright on the article below.

Article © SeniorDiscounts.com 2002

----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Hollinghurst" <>
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 1:42 AM

Hello to all,

Have a Happy Thanksgiving! Hopefully you will be visiting with family,
at home or away. Make sure you have enough film and batteries and have
charged up the batteries for the digital camera and the video camera. The
opportunities for genealogy are here again in the holidays. While you are
out buying supplies, don't forget batteries and tape for the tape recorder -
it's time to take it out and dust it off. You can either just let it
record, with a long playing tape, or keep it handy and turn it on when the
family stories get repeated. Remember, you may not have such a grand
opportunity again for another year or maybe never.

I have also copied, below, the history of Thanksgiving. It may not be
complete but it includes some interesting items that I didn't know. Sounds
like we need a list of exactly when Thanksgiving occurred for each year,
especially before 1941 when there was no set date for the holiday. It would
be nice to have the true date of some of those old Thanksgiving pictures.
Does anyone no of such a list?

Enjoy!

Paul

********************************************

This Thursday, November 28th, is Thanksgiving. Celebrated every fourth
Thursday in November, Thanksgiving marks the end of the fall harvest season,
and the beginning of the winter holiday season. However, Thanksgiving hasn't
always been celebrated on this day. In fact, it hasn't always been
celebrated in November! Below is a brief history of Thanksgiving, including
some unusual facts about the holiday.

Most people know that the modern tradition of Thanksgiving goes back to the
Pilgrims and their first autumn in the New World. The Pilgrims in question
were actually Puritan English separatists who left England to escape
religious persecution. The Pilgrims set ground at Plymouth Rock on December
11, 1620. Their first winter in America was a devastating one, they lost 46
of the original 102 who sailed on the Mayflower. However, the harvest of
1621 was a bountiful one. The surviving colonists decided to celebrate with
a feast with the Native Americans who had helped the Pilgrims adjust to
their new surroundings. It is believed that the Pilgrims would not have made
it through the year without the help of the natives. The first Thanksgiving
was a traditional Autumn harvest festival and lasted three days.

Thanksgiving wasn't celebrated until a few years later after the same group
of Pilgrims weathered a devastating drought. The next Thanksgiving wasn't
celebrated for another 50 years, and this time it was celebrated in June!
After America's independence, Thanksgiving was commonly proclaimed by the
president, and usually celebrated in December, including being proclaimed
and celebrated twice in 1815 by President James Madison, (neither time in
the autumn!) but never enjoying national holiday status. In 1863 President
Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November to be Thanksgiving. The
holiday continued to vary from year to year until President Roosevelt signed
a bill on November 26th, 1941, that established the fourth Thursday in
November as the national Thanksgiving public holiday.

Here's a few more interesting Thanksgiving facts:

In the US, about 280 million turkeys are sold for the Thanksgiving
celebrations.
Thanksgiving was also celebrated twice in 1863, once on August 6th to
celebrating the Union victory at Gettysburg.
Benjamin Franklin wanted the national bird to be a turkey.

Article © SeniorDiscounts.com 2002

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