Belated Thanksgiving!
Hey guys! Last
week was the American holiday Thanksgiving which is celebrated on the fourth
Thursday of November each year. So first of all, belated Thanksgiving! I don’t
want to tell you about the history of this special day, which we all learned in
school, but about facts you may not know yet. First Thanksgiving ever was
celebrated in 1621, when the pilgrims invited Natives to have a meal with them
in honour to their first successful harvest.
It was kind of a festival which lasted 3 days. They didn’t just eat,
they also hunted and did other entertaining things. What you probably didn’t
know is that there were no turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie or potatoes.
The Natives brought five deers, so they ate venison for sure. One thing many
people don’t know is that Thanksgiving was not celebrated each year from 1621
on. In 1789 president George Washington announced the first ever national thanksgiving
holiday which took place on Thursday November 26. However, it did not become an
annual national holiday until the 19th century. Sara Josepha Hale, an American writer, was
inspired by a diary of pilgrim life and wanted to recreate that first Thanksgiving.
So she started a campaign to make
thanksgiving a national holiday and published recipes for pumpkin pie, Turkey and stuffing. In 1863 during the civil war Abraham Lincoln announced that from
now on Thanksgiving would be celebrated on the last Thursday of November each
year. In 1939, however, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the holiday up a week in order to give the
retailers more time to make money through the free Christmas shopping season. This
was criticised by the public, so in 1941 Roosevelt signed a bill fixing Thanksgiving
on the fourth Thursday in November. From then on it has been celebrated each year.
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