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The Evolution of Thanksgiving Day
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20567 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
3,690 Words |
| Author
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Peggy Robbins
Peggy Robbins, a Tennessee native, is a free-lance writer
living in Gulfport, Mississippi. Over the past three decades,
she has written extensively about American heritage and
military history. |
No other holiday that is today widely observed in North America has such a long and curious history as Thanksgiving.
Throughout the Bible, there are references, to the Israelites setting apart days for special thanksgiving to the Lord. Such days were common in England before the Reformation and afterwards figured in the lives of the Protestants. In 1872, February 27 was set aside as a day of thanksgiving for the Prince of Wales' recovery form typhoid fever, for example.
The first thanksgiving in North America was conducted by an English minister with the expedition of Martin Frobisher, an English explorer searching for the Northwest Passage, on the shores of Newfoundland, in eastern Canada. The day's observances were recorded in the log of the expedition's ship:
On Monday morning, May 27, 1578, aboard the Ayde, we all received the communion by the minister of Gravesend, and prepared as good Christians toward God and resolute men of all fortunes; and toward night we departed toward Tillbury [Tillberry] Hope. Here we highly praysed God and altogether, upon our knees, gave Him due humble and hearty thanks, and Maister Wolfall, the learned man appointed to be our minister by Majesty's council, made unto us a godlye sermon, exhorting all especially to be thankful to God for His strange and miraculous deliverances in these dangerous places."
This is believed to have been the first Christian sermon preached and the first Holy Communion celebrated in North America.
The earliest recorded observance of a service of thanksgiving within the territory of the present United States was in the Popham settlement at Sagadahoc, on the coast of Maine, in 1607: "Sundaye being the nineth of August, 1607, in the morninge, the most part of the hole company of both our ships landed on this island, where the cross standeth, and there we heard a sermon delyvred unto us by our preacher, giving God thanks for our happy meetings and safe aryvall into this country."
Pilgrims' Legacy
But these were only days of thanksgiving. The real, distinctively American Thanksgiving Day is a legacy of the Pilgrims-the English colonists, led by separatists from the Church of England-who arrived in America in December 1620 aboard the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Colony. The first
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