by Joe Snyder
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I hope my readers had a happy Thanksgiving. Most of us, I think, celebrated the annual fall harvest holiday with a sumptuous harvest meal with the company of good friends or family. It’s a tradition that is now almost 400 years, predating even football and the frantic rush of Christmas shopping. Yes, Christmas is less than three weeks away.
Many of us took a few moments during that day, between eating and visiting, to think about what we are most thankful for this year, which is appropriate. Few of us perhaps gave much serious thought to this holiday’s origins.
History books tell us that a group of English settlers observed a day of thanksgiving to God on Dec. 4, 1619, for their safe arrival at a Virginia site known as the Berkeley Hundred. The settlers of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts best known as pilgrims, after their first harvest in 1621 had a Thanksgiving celebration that included food and time to praise God. They invited Indians to the feast, and that gathering most of us think of whenever the first Thanksgiving is mentioned.
Politicians, recognizing the value of the celebration seeded by the settlers, became involved in 1777 when the Continental Congress issued the first official Thanksgiving proclamation by a president in 1789.
Those early celebrations and proclamations were heavy on thanking God for his sustenance and support. President Washington designated a Thanksgiving holiday in 1789 so people could thank God for the young country’s newly ratified Constitution and form of government.
President Lincoln made Thanksgiving a federal holiday on the last Thursday in November. President Franklin D. Roosevelt later moved the annual holiday the fourth Thursday in November where it still is, along with our own individual observances.
There are some people who question whether all the people at the earliest Thanksgivings, especially the Indians at Plymouth Colony, really had any reason to celebrate given that they were soon to lose their land and way of life. They say the traditional story of the holiday’s origin paints a false picture of the relationship that doomed the Indians.
Others, however, prefer to focus on the progress made and focus on what they have to be thankful for today. Christian Kramer of the Standing Bear Inter-tribal Brotherhood of Native Americans is along that group. Kramer was a recent Thanks- giving Day speaker at a meeting where he asked descendants of those arriving on the Mayflower to stand. Among them was his wife.
“I think it’s safe to say we’ve come full circle in those relationships,” Kramer said. Some have – some haven’t. But most of us prefer to look at this holiday as the celebration it was intended to be and focus on giving thanks rather than dwelling on the past and actions by our forefathers almost 400 years ago.
We can quickly compile a list of things for which we can be thankful for today, things that have much more to do with our personal life, family and friends, than football games and a turkey carcass on the table.