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The first Thanksgivings were harvest festivals — days for thanking God for plentiful crops.

For this reason, the holiday takes place late in the fall, after the crops have been gathered. For thousands of years, people in many lands have held harvest festivals. The American Thanksgiving Day probably grew out of the harvest-home celebration tradition in Europe. 

In the United States, Thanksgiving is usually a family day, celebrated with big dinners and joyous reunions. The very mention of Thanksgiving often calls up memories of kitchens and pantries crowded with good things to eat. Thanksgiving is also a time for serious religious thinking, church services and prayer.

One of the first Thanksgiving observances in America was entirely religious and did not involve feasting. On Dec. 4, 1619, 39 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Plantation on the James River near what is now Charles City, Va.

The group’s charter required that the day of arrival be observed yearly as a day of thanksgiving to God.

The first New England Thanksgiving was celebrated less than a year after the Plymouth colonists had settled in the new land. Most of us learned in school about how the hard winter killed half the members of the colony. By the summer of 1621, their hopes were high and the corn fields yielded a great harvest, thanks to the help of the Indians and one in particular, Squanto, who taught the method of placing a fish in the soil for fertilization.

On July 30, 1623, a Thanksgiving Day for the purpose of prayer as well as celebration was decreed by the governor. The women of the colony spent many days preparing for the feast. The children helped by turning roasts on spits in front of open fires. Indians brought wild turkeys and deer meat. The men of the colony brought geese, ducks and fish. The women served meat and fish with journey cake, corn meal bread with nuts and succotash.  Everyone ate outdoors at big tables.

The celebration spread from Plymouth to other New England colonies. During the Revolutionary War, eight special days of thanksgiving were observed for victories and for being saved from dangers.

In 1789, President George Washington issued a general proclamation naming Nov. 26 a day of national thanksgiving. During the same year, the Protestant and Episcopal Church announced that the first Thursday in November would be a regular yearly day for giving thanks.

For many years, there was no regular national Thanksgiving Day in the United States.  Some of the states had a yearly Thanksgiving holiday, and others did not. But by 1830, New York had an official state Thanksgiving Day, and other Northern states soon followed.  Virginia was the first Southern state to adopt the custom. It proclaimed a Thanksgiving Day in 1855.

Then President Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November 1863 as “a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father.”

Each year afterward, for 75 years, the President of the United States formally proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day should be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. But in 1939, President Roosevelt set it one week earlier. He wanted to help business by lengthening the shopping period before Christmas. Congress finally ruled that after 1941 the fourth Thursday of November would be observed as Thanksgiving Day and would be a legal federal holiday.

As we close this Thanksgiving weekend, let us all be mindful that we should continue to “gather together to ask the Lord’s blessings” on these United States of America.

Etta Reid, a local historian and educator, lives in Summerfield. She can be reached at etreid@aol.com.