THANKSGIVING – AMERICAN’S FAVOURITE HOLIDAY
Thanksgiving is a national holiday, mostly celebrated in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November. Countries like Germany or Japan have similarly named festivals as well, where they show happiness and gratitude for the harvest and the other blessings of the past year.
1. HISTORY OF THANKSGIVING
Either if we talk about Thanksgiving as a holiday celebration or as a religious service, the question of where it was held for the first time in the United States has been a subject of dispute for many years, mainly between New England and Virginia.
Pilgrims and Puritans who emigrated from England in the 1620s and 1630s carried this tradition with them to New England, the modern Thanksgiving being traced to a very well–recorded event in present-day Massachusetts. The 1621 feast was prompted by a good harvest, a time when the Pilgrims celebrated this with Native Americans, who had helped them get through the previous winter by giving them food in a time of scarcity.
Although in 1789, George Washington, as the president of the United States, proclaimed the first nationwide thanksgiving celebration on November 26, “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer”, Abraham Lincoln was the one who set the date for the modern celebration for all states, in the 19th century.
However, Thanksgiving, as we know it at the moment, is celebrated at the end of November, on the fourth Thursday of the month, as it was specified in a resolution passed by Congress and in a proclamation issued by President Franklin Roosevelt.
2. CELEBRATING THANKSGIVING NOWADAYS
Thanksgiving is the busiest travel day of the year, as the American Automobile Association has estimated, considering that over 42 million Americans travel more than 50 miles for celebrating this event and another 4 million people fly to visit their loved ones for spending this holiday together.
As the United States became more urban, this celebration turned into a time to gather together with all your loved ones, because in modern times family members began to live farther apart. That is the moment when the holiday moved away from its religious roots, so new traditions have appeared instead, like the Macy’s Parade or the American football game.
The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, taking place every year in New York City, is the world’s largest parade, presented by the department store chain Macy’s. During this parade’s evolution, the balloons we know today were introduced in 1928 for replacing live zoo animals. In addition to those, the Parade also features live music and other performances. College and high school marching bands from across the country participate in it and the television broadcasts feature performances by established and up–and–coming singers and bands. The event always concludes with the arrival of Santa Claus to ring in the Christmas and holiday season.
Another tradition that lasts since the first Thanksgiving celebration is the wishbone, commonly used for good – luck. The practise consists of two people tugging on either end of the turkey’s bone while making a wish until it breaks. It is said that whoever wins the larger piece of the bone will have their wish turned into reality.
3. TRADITIONAL FOOD FOR THANKSGIVING
The food eaten at the first Thanksgiving feast was not too different from the one Americans eat nowadays for celebrating. The pilgrims’ meal consisted of turkey, pumpkin, berries and fruits, so since then, the people from the United States became, for no reason, turkey lovers. According to some recent studies, over 95% of Americans eat turkey on this day and around 280 million turkeys are sold during the weeks before the holiday.Moreover, there is another essential element that mustn’t be forgotten when preparing the Thanksgiving dinner. I am talking about cranberries, which are more than a side dish, as the Native Americans were the first to discover the many benefits of these fruits. Besides eating them, the people from America used cranberries for dying their clothes, rugs or blankets and as well for medicinal purposes.
