The Importance of Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving Day is an annual holiday in the United States and Canada but is also celebrated in other parts of the world. Thanksgiving is celebrated to honor the harvest and other blessings in the past year. It all started when a ship called the Mayflower left England, hoping to find another place to start their lives, where they could practice their religion. After a long, harsh trip the Pilgrims finally reached Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Throughout the first brutal winter, most of the colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from terrible contagious diseases.

Only half of the Mayflower’s original passengers and crew lived to see what they called the first New England spring. In March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received an astonishing visit from an Indian leader. Later they meet an Indian named Squanto who helped the Pilgrims survive. Squanto helped them extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers, avoid poisonous plants, and even more. Later that year in around 1621 after their first successful corn harvest they decided to celebrate. They invited many people to feast with them including the Wampanoag chief leader Massasoit and his tribe. In the 3 day long-lasting feast the Pilgrims ate many things including duck, deer, ham, lobster, clams, berries, fruit, pumpkin, squash, and many more.

Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving

Well how do people celebrate Thanksgiving now, there are many different things that people do to celebrate it today? Some main things people do is to decorate the inside of their house, get family from everywhere to come together, eat lots of food, and go shopping for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Many families decorate their houses to make their houses more appealing to others. It shows the family's true spirit and pride of Thanksgiving while decorating. Americans spend almost between $60 to $100 on Thanksgiving decorations a year. Many people use simple things like lights and colorful objects, but others have feats, pumpkins, and lots of other things. The next thing many families do is a get-together, where family from all parts of the world come together to celebrate this auspicious holiday.

Every year each family meets somewhere and has a big feast to celebrate Thanksgiving. The feast can last up to one day or even one week. It is a time to have fun with family and friends. The next thing is food. Many families hold large feasts and eat lots of food. The most common foods are turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, cornbread, candy yams, and cranberry sauce. The most common desserts are pecan pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin roll, apple pie, pumpkin cupcakes, cranberry cheesecake, sugar cookies, The most common drinks are wine, beer, sparkling drinks, or even juices. The last thing people do is going shopping or even shopping online. The best 2 days in the year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are all for shopping lovers. On Black Friday, you can get the best deals on anything in the store. You can get lots of discounts and coupons to buy whatever you like. But if you’re lazy then Cyber Monday is the best day for you. You can get discounts and coupons, but the difference is everything is online.

Both Thanksgivings, the one celebrated in 1621 and the Thanksgiving celebrated today are similar in many different ways. They both have lots of food, and a family or group get together. Today and back then, there were long lasting feasts with lots of foods. Some of the food choices have changed but turkey, corn, and fish have still stayed along with beer as a drink. Both celebrations lasted long around a 3 day period. Another common thing was the get together. In both friends and family came over to celebrate, like the Pilgrims invited the Wampanoag people to come over. This year I celebrated Thanksgiving with my family by going out. Every year on Thanksgiving we have a tradition to go to a nearby city and spend the day there. We went to Napa, and visited many wineries there, and took many photos. We also went to an expensive Italian restaurant for lunch, the food there was great.