The history of Thanksgiving in America

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President George W. Bush visits the Thanksgiving Shrine in Virginia in 2007

Today is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States. As we gather to celebrate with family and friends, let me offer a short history lesson on the holiday origins in America.

In the fall of 1619 the Margaret set sail from Bristol, England on a roughly two-month voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Captain John Woodliffe would bring his ship with 38 settlers safely to what was known as Berkeley Hundred on December 4.

Berkeley Hundred was a land grant from the Virginia Company of London, an English stock company formed by King James I in order to fund the establishment of colonial settlements in America.

The Berkeley Hundred land grant went to a group of five men, including John Smyth, who became the official historian of the group. Over the next two decades he collected documents relating to the settlement of what would be known as "Virginia", and these still survive today.

The land grant was for some eight thousand acres along the James River a few miles west of Jamestown, which itself had been the first British colony in the New World just a few years earlier.

The proprietors of the Virginia Company had directed in their granting of the land charter that "the day of our ships arrival...shall be yearly and perpetually kept as a day of Thanksgiving." The settlers of the Margaret did indeed keep that celebration, doing so more than two years prior to the popularly remembered landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Over the hundreds of years since, there have been many disputes as to the official beginnings of this holiday which has become formally known as Thanksgiving Day here in America. Most of those disputes have been sources of regional pride battles between Virginia and the New England area.

When he became the first President of the United States, George Washington proclaimed that Thursday, November 26, 1789 was an official "...day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God."

It was from this Washington proclamation that most formal Thanksgiving celebrations were celebrated on the final Thursday in November. However, it was not an official national holiday. 

Following decades of lobbying by schoolteacher and author Sara Hale of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" fame, President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 called for such an official Thanksgiving Day holiday on the last Thursday in November. However, the rancor of the Civil War caused the celebration to become delayed until the 1870's.

The United States would then celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November until the early days of World War II. On December 26, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law a joint congressional resolution moving the official celebration to the fourth Thursday in November. 

Christianity Clearly Under Attack in America

When you see the atrocities taking place in Syria today, as well as in other areas of the Middle East, involving the burning of Christian churches and the destruction of entire Christian communities, it really makes you thankful that you live here, in America.

America, where Christians are safe. Not only safe, but where Christian ideals are front and center, a difference maker, a vital, indispensable part of our founding principles. You know, America, the protector of religious freedom.

 The nation founded by leaders such as George Washington, who once told the Delaware Indian chiefs "You do well to learn our arts and our ways of life and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ." Such as Thomas Jefferson, who said "I am a real Christian - that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus Christ." Such as Benjamin Franklin, who said "As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, is the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see."

The United States of America, a nation clearly founded by Christian men and women, and clearly built up over the centuries by many more of the same, such as Abraham Lincoln: "Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way, all our present difficulty."

Yet it is here, in that very America, where a large, increasingly hostile, increasingly antagonistic segment of society is actively moving on the attack against Christian morals and ethics. I believe that we are seeing the beginnings of an attempt to erase the practice of the Christian faith itself in America and around the globe. If it falls here in the United States, what other nation can hope to keep the faith standing?

Washington Rolling Over in His Grave

The Father of our Country, our nation's first President and possibly still it's greatest citizen in history, George Washington, would be proud that the country decided to name a state after him.

That is, until he got wind of what is going on these days in that state. Upon learning of these developments, the great man would be rolling over in his grave.

Washington state has today become one of the worst offenders in the growing attacks on our Judeo-Christian heritage here in America, attacks that have weakened our society and made our very national existence more vulnerable than at any time in its history.

This year the state lurched ever further leftward at the state Capitol building itself. Here a Christmas display was erected, as has been the case for decades. A typical manger display with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. Some of the most appropriate imagery of the Christmas holiday season.

However, right next to it was permitted to be erected a sign on an easel that reads: "There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

It was placed there by an atheist organization whose sole mission is to drive religion from public discourse. They couch their 'dis-belief', their lack of faith, in a Constitutional argument, stating that no one has a right to force religion down their throats.

They are absolutely correct in that regard. Perhaps they aren't aware that those of us who count ourselves among the faithful have no desire to do any such thing.