Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a holiday in the USA when people give thanks, celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. Normally, the Americans eat turkey on this day.

The First Thanksgiving
The pilgrims invited their two key Indian helpers, Squanto, Samoset, plus Chief Massasoit, to share in their Thanksgiving since they had been so instrumental in the pilgrims´ successes that summer. The Indians brought their families, numbering over 90 people. The pilgrims were overwhelmed, and didn´t have enough food, so the Indians brought along their own supplies for the feast. The Wampanoags brought turkey, deer, berries, squash, cornbread, and beans - things that they'd farmed and that they'd shown the Pilgrims how to care for.
The first Thanksgiving had nothing to do with Pilgrims or Indians sharing meals. Much of the credit for the adoption of a later ANNUAL national Thanksgiving Day may be attributed to Mrs. Sarah Joseph Hale, the editor of Godey's Lady's Book. For thirty years, she promoted the idea of a national Thanksgiving Day, contacting President after President until President Abraham Lincoln responded in 1863 by setting aside the last Thursday of November as a national Day of Thanksgiving. Over the next seventy-five years, Presidents followed Lincoln's precedent, annually declaring a national Thanksgiving Day. Then, in 1941, Congress permanently established the fourth Thursday of each November as a national holiday.


We had a nice Thanksgiving meal. Doug was up at 5:30am getting the turkey ready. He had to leave for work at 1:30pm so that meant we had to get an early start so we could have an early dinner. It was just Doug, Ellie, Teela and I. We bought a small 10lb turkey that Doug prepared and cooked. We also had roasted potatoes, sauteed mushrooms and asparagus, artichokes and stuffing. For dessert we had cheesecake from TJ's (yum). Ellie was begging to eat turkey, it was so cute and so weird that a child of MINE could look at a dead bird carcass and think of food (yuck.) She ate a lot of turkey and also ate a whole artichoke (they were very large artichokes too.) I guess she gest the loving meat part of her from Doug and the loving vegetables from me.