What is Thanksgiving, and How Does it Relate to Australia?

Thanksgiving is an annual national holiday in the United States of America and Canada that celebrates the harvest and other blessings of the past year.

Americans generally believe that Thanksgiving is modelled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (Pilgrims) of Plymouth and the Wampanong people.

In brief, what happened was that in 1620 about a hundred pilgrims who dissented with the Church of England sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to look for a new place to live. The immigrants settled a small town now known as Plymouth in Massachusetts.

The new environment was tough during their first winter, and half the pilgrims died from disease.

When spring came, the Wampanoag people, the indigenous settlers, taught the pilgrims how to grow corn, which was new to the immigrants. They also taught them how to hunt, fish and showed them the favourable crops to grow in the area.

In autumn 1621 there was a bumper harvest of cereal, especially barley and corn.

The immigrants had much to be grateful for, so a feast was planned. The indigenous chief and a few members of the local tribe were invited to the banquet.

The locals brought deer with fowls, and pilgrims offered other wild meat. The immigrants learned new methods of cooking different kinds of corn and cranberries.

In the subsequent years, several of the first pilgrims celebrated thanksgiving after the harvest during autumn.

Thanksgiving Day is presently celebrated on the fourth Thursday of every November, a date that was set by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939.

As a religious festival, Australia sometimes has harvest and thanksgiving church services, but most don’t celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.

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• Holidays
• Food
• Living and Lifestyle