Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. Traditionally, it is a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude in general. It is a holiday celebrated primarily in Canada and the United States. While perhaps religious in origin, Thanksgiving is now primarily identified as a secular holiday.
Thanksgiving began when white "Pilgrim" settlers from Europe came to the US, and had a really lousy harvest as the rocky soil around where they settled did not have the nutrients needed for plants to grow. Many of their crops died, people were starving to death and were ill from the new food and bacteria in this new land...and the local tribes brought in some of their stores of food and medicine to help the people survive the winter that they were woefully unprepared for. When the crops did come in after a native intrepreter taught them how to grow food by planting dead fish in with the seeds to provide fertilizer for the plants, the pilgrems decided to have a huge Thanksgiving feast. They hunted wild Turkeys, and when the Tribal leader came with 95 people to aid in food preparations, he sent them out to hunt and they added 5 deer as well as made popcorn and other wild foraged foods. An interesting note: Only four of their married women had survived, and only five teenage girls, three of those being the sole survivors of their families. There were less than 55 survivors.
It was not religious in origin, but survivalist. Perhaps the local priest and medicine person said some prayers over the meal...I guess in that way that could be seen as religious.
Oddly enough, those same settlers attacked the tribes that gave food to them the following year as their crops failed and stole the rest of their stores. So much for sharing and being thankful to the people you just the year before called your friends.
I find it strange that so many people beleive that Native Americans dont still exist, and that people are forgetting the true origions of Thanksgiving. But its that way with history. The winners write whatever they want to in the books. *Grins*
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