Jacqueline~

Thanksgiving is mostly a Canadian and American tradition but many other countries have started to celebrate this holiday. These countries include Australia, and the Netherlands. Thanksgiving is a holiday that celebrates the end of harvest and gives thanks for everything.

This holiday originated from an explorer by the name of Martin Forbisher in the year 1578. Though he wasn’t celebrating the harvest. He celebrated making it through a long journey trying to find a northern passage to the Pacific Ocean. The explorer celebrated because at that time Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin had recently died from a long journey and he was thankful for living. Though the origin of thanksgiving is different from Canada to the United States. In the U.S thanksgiving was started by many people. The best estimate is that the first thanksgiving festival was in what is now Saint Augustine, Florida on September 8th 1565 hosted by the Spanish.

Though Canada and the United States have different dates for thanksgiving the way we celebrate is the same. Canada’s thanksgiving is on the second Monday of October and the U.S’s is on the fourth Thursday of November. The tradition is to have a feast. This feast usually includes a turkey, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, and some sort of corn among other dishes.  Thanksgiving is also religious for some people by giving thanks to God. Another popular tradition is to watch NFL football on thanksgiving day. Mostpeople think about turkey, pumpkins, and cornucopia when thinking about thanksgiving. We think about turkey because we eat turkey on that day and we think about pumpkins because they had just come into season but why do we think of cornucopias? We think of cornucopias because when thanksgiving was first started in had been used as a center piece on the dinner table. It was used this way because it held many foods we eat and was a symbol of abundance. For those of you that don’t know what a cornucopia is, it is a large horn shaped basket that holds the some of the harvest. A cornucopia is also called the horn of plenty, and the harvest cone.

I hope you enjoy your thanksgiving and family celebration when ever your thanksgiving is even though some readers may not celebrate this North American holiday.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Best Blog Posts 2010, Holidays and Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.