Thanksgiving is a very important holiday in present-day American culture. People all throughout America take extra care to make this day a memorable and happy celebration. This tradition has been in the American lifestyle since 1621 when it first started. Even though this tradition has been altered and changed the significance and meaning remains the same. The first Thanksgiving was an important landmark and made a huge imprint in the American culture today.
The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the English Separatists who had come to the new world. They came traveling on the mayflower to escape England for religious freedom. Many of the Separatists, often called pilgrims, suffered many hardships on the way to the new world. Even when they finally reached their destination they found things to be difficult. Separatists should not to be taken lightly, though the journey was hard they stuck with it. Richard Hakluyt said, ‘“We are well weaned from the delicate milk of our mother country, and inured the difficulties of a strange and hard land, which yet in a great part we have by patience overcome . . .’” (qtd. in Philbrick 6). After the Pilgrims arrived they picked land by rivers with good planting area and called it Plymouth. A harsh winter came quickly upon the Pilgrims where they faced many hardships before spring relieved them. Now was their time to plant and prepare for the oncoming year. They did not know the land well and many people say that the only reason they survived was because a local Indian, named Squanto, helped them and taught them the ways of his people. Soon the settlers had much of their planting done.
Harvest Time was here and was changing the face of the Separatist attitude. After such a hard winter the ...
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...ed time is still found on the fourth Thursday of every November to have a day of Thanksgiving. A small group of English Separatists made the big difference today, changing the lifestyle of Americans just by one little Harvest Festival. That little festival is the reason why today millions go and buy huge turkeys and gather with their families to celebrate and give thanks.
Works Cited
Conforti, Joseph. Saints and Strangers. Baltimore: JHU Press, 2006.
Nielsen, Arthur. "1789 Two Hundred Years Ago." American Heritage 01 Nov 1989: 153.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Mayflower. New York: The Viking Press, 2006.
Schwarz, Fredric. "The First Thanksgiving, Sort Of." American Heritage 01 Nov 1996: 157.
Winslow, Edward. Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth. Cambridge: J. K. Wiggin, 1865.
Brownscombe, Jennie A. The First Thanksgiving at Plymoth. 1914. Pilgrim Hall, New York.
The first Thanksgiving was a celebration of coming together between Native Americans and the English settlers in the fall of 1621 in Plymouth Colony. Before this first Thanksgiving, the settlers were preparing for the harsh coming winter by gathering food and supplies. With the help of Squanto, a Wampanoag Indian who knew English, the settlers to grow corn and use fish to fertilize the soil for better harvest. Squanto helped the Colonists learn how to fish. This brought the Wampanoag Indians closer to the English settlers. They began to work together, soon the Native Americans offered to help hunt for and with the English settlers. The leader of the Wampanoag, Massasoit and 90 of his mencame for the first Thanksgiving. For three days, the English and the native men, women and children celebrated together playing games, singing songs, dancing and feasting on their harvest. Their meal consisted of corn, shellfish and other roasted meat like duck, goose and venison. This marked the historic and first Thanksgiving holiday of the history of our nation.
But they were days of prayer, not just of feasting. The tradition of the Pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving is both a myth and legend. The pilgrims did not celebrate Thanksgiving the next year or any year thereafter, but some of their descendants later made a “Forefathers Day” that usually occurred on the 21st or 22nd of December. Some presidents made one-time Thanksgiving holidays and in 1863 Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday. Our Thanksgiving today is the fourth Thursday of November, thanks to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. But the pilgrims first thanksgiving began at some unknown date between September 21 and November 9. The date of Thanksgiving was probably set by Lincoln to somewhat correlate with the anchoring of the Mayflower at Cape Cod, which occurred on November 21 of
Moraff,C. The Real History of Thanksgiving." Philadelphia Magazine (2012).p.n.d. Data retrieved from http://www.phillymag.com/news/2012/11/20/dark-origins-thanksgiving/ on May 6,2014.
When the great holiday of Thanksgiving comes to mind, most people think of becoming total gluttons and gorging themselves with a seemingly unending amount of food. Others might think of the time spent with family and friends. The whole basis of the holiday is family togetherness, fellowship, and thankfulness for blessings received during the previous year.
This is a disgrace! To all the turkey’s at Thanksgiving! forty-five million turkey’s are cooked a year. Not only are those awful humans eating us, now they are entrapping us in disgusting cages and making us eat only corn and soybeans. That’s not even the worst part, they put something in our food called vitamins and minerals. I heard yesterday from keith, my turkey friend, that they talk about how they feed turkeys healthy things so that the people who buy the turkeys won’t get sick or something like that. They also say we taste different at different ages.
Thanksgiving Compare and Contrast Food, Family, and Fun!! Thanksgiving is a national holiday in the United States, always celebrated on a Thursday in November. There are many different ways people celebrate Thanksgiving. You give thanks and celebrate what you are most thankful for. Thanksgiving is a national holiday that has many different traditions, activities, and foods in different families.
[2] If one were to ask the man on the street to recite the story of the Pilgrims, it would go something like this: These religious people wanted to worship as they pleased, so they left England and came to America; the voyage was hard and many of them died, but with the help of Squanto they were able to raise crops the next Spring and Summer. They had a bountiful harvest, and in the Fall they invited the Indians to join them in a thanksgiving feast where they served roasted wild turkey. Their strong religious faith and trust in God's providence were the main reasons they prospered in the New World. Quite likely these two facts would not be mentioned: the Pilgrims were a separate group from the Puritans, and the Plymouth Colony failed to obtain a charter and ultimately became a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692. Also absent from the recital would be the fact that Plymouth, the poor but proud capital of the Pilgrim Colony, sank to the status of a not-very-important county seat, its interests shrinking to a radius of a few miles and the scale of its affairs lessening accordingly (Willison 408).
Many people believe that Columbus Day is not a day to be celebrated. The Americas had a very complex culture with their own laws, oral language, and art. They encouraged individuality, uprightedness, freedom, strength, and generosity. Some places such as the Aztec and Inca Empires were as densely populated as Europe was. When Columbus came onto this continent, he had no right to destroy what was rightfully there before. Furthermore, with him, came smallpox, slavery, genocide, death, and destruction. However, even if the Indian society was developed and pretty complex, the Europeans were a questing and growing civilization that ultimately led to what the modern world is now. They had the wheel, a written language, agriculture, and much permanent settlement. Western Europe was also equally split...
A young Christopher Columbus set foot on a hot, tropical island on October 12th, 1492. Little did he know that his discovery has become a crucial part of Hispanic culture and its influence on the history of mankind. Hispanic Day commemorates the day in which the Hispanic culture was first spread to the Americas with Christopher Columbus during Spain’s Golden Age. The day Columbus’s troop landed on that Caribbean island, vast cultural development was put into momentum. On this date the first encounter between Europe and the Americas took place. Hispanic Day is an actively celebrated holiday that arose from the European desire for goods from Asia. It had many consequences on the way the history of Spain shaped out to be, and it is a very significant holiday today. Hispanic Day is often understood by the public using the analogy that Christopher Columbus was the torch that spread the flame of Hispanic culture all around the world. This flame still burns today, resulting in the celebration of Hispanic Day.
After braving two months at sea, crossing the stormy Atlantic Ocean, the Pilgrims finally landed off the coast of the New World. In the freezing December waters, they anchored the Mayflower and sent a landing party to what is now Plymouth Harbor beach. To secure the small landing boat against the rain and winds, they tied it to a large rock - Plymouth Rock - and so begins the legend of the original Thanksgiving tale.
...mayflower). It was so bad that in fact, without the help of the area’s native people, it is probable that none of the colonists would have survived. Samoset, an English-speaking Pawtuxet, helped the colonists form an alliance with the local Wampanoags. The Wampanoags taught them how to gather shellfish and grow corn, to hunt local animals, beans and squash. The Plymouth colonists celebrated their first successful harvest with a three-day festival of thanksgiving. We still observe this feast today.
Thanksgiving, traditionally, is a time of gathering families together to express our gratitude for one another over a large roasted turkey. According to the Huffington Post, one fifth of the total 235 million turkeys eaten in the United States are consumed on Thanksgiving Day (1). There are a number of different theories on how the turkey got its name. Some people say that Columbus thought that the land he discovered was connected to India which was known for having large flocks of peacocks. When he saw these strange large birds he thought they were related to the peacock family so he named them Tuka, which means peacock in the language of India (2). Others say that the name came from Native American’s calling them Firkee, which was later adapted to Turkey (2). Another theory is that the birds did not come directly from the New World to England. Instead, they came via merchant ships from the eastern Mediterranean Sea which were called ‘Turkey Merchants’ because a lot of the area was a part of the Turkish Empire at the time. Purchasers of the birds back home in England thought the fowl came from the area so they called them ‘turkey birds’ and soon after just ‘turkeys’ (2).
On the Twelfth of october every year, the United states of America celebrates a very controversial holiday. Columbus day. Which marks the day that Spanish explorer and conquistador Christopher Columbus first landed on the island of Hispaniola (Now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Many good things have come out of Columbus’ crew first landing in the Americas. The blending of culture between the old and the new world, the beginning of the globalization of our world. But even the best diamond has its blemishes. Millions upon millions of Native Americans lost their lives in the following hundreds of years from old world diseases and gold thirsty Europeans.
Columbus day is one of the oldest and most traditional holiday in American history. However, many people do not know what they are celebrating. America should not continue to celebrate Columbus Day because of the cruelty Columbus brought to the natives, his legacy, and achievements. Columbus Day is unreasonably celebrated because he brought the terrible act of the raping of native women, hunting of people with dogs, and harsh punishments. Moreover, it should stop being celebrated as Columbus also created the opportunity for the spread of diseases, slavery, and death. Additionally, some of his achievements that are celebrated such as: the discovery of the new world, his theory of the earth's shape, and establishing contact with the new world
The Columbus Day holiday should not be replaced with Indigenous People Day. In the year of 1492, a man under the name of Christopher Columbus set out to find India. Instead of the planned trip, he sailed 4,285 miles and came to a foreign land; a land we now call America. However, a controversy has arose from this story. Because of Columbus, thousands of millions of people suffered and died (Lassitter). Many people blame him for the death of these people, and for never actually finding North America, as many said he did (Long). Columbus Day recognizes the achievements of a great Renaissance explorer who founded the first permanent European settlement in the New World (Kern). The arrival of Columbus in 1492 marks the beginning of recorded history in America and opened relations between the Americas and the rest of the world.