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Thanksgiving is a national holiday in the United States. In America, there were at least two thanksgiving celebrations before the one that took place at Plymouth in 1621. In 1607, a group of English settlers led by Captain George Popham met with a group of Abnaki Indians²near the mouth of the Kennebec River to share a harvest feast and prayer meeting. On December 14, 1619, there was a celebration in Virginia led by Captain John Woodleaf and thirty-nine colonists who had traveled up the James River from Jamestown to a place called Berkeley Hundred, where they went ashore and gave thanks.

Most Americans, however, think of the first “official” Thanksgiving as being the one that took place at Plymouth Colony in October 1621, a year after the pilgrims first landed on theNew England coast. They were joined in their three-day feast by Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoag³tribe, and about ninety of his fellow tribesmen. Only fifty of the original 100 Pilgrims had survived the first winter, and those who did owed their survival to the Indians. The feast they shared with them in 1621 was primarily a harvest celebration rather than a religious one.

During the next several years, no one specific day was set aside in the American colonies for giving thanks. A day would be named when there was a special reason to be thankful, such as a bumper crop or escape from an epidemic. It was largely due to the efforts of a women’s magazine editor named Sarah Hale that Thanksgiving came to be a national holiday. She petitioned presidents and government officials for more than twenty years to establish a national day of thanksgiving. On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln finally proclaimed the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it up a week to stimulate the economy by allowing more time for Christmas shopping. But the tradition was already so well established that the change created an uproar. Finally, Congress ruled in 1941 that the fourth Thursday in November would be the legal federal holiday. Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving Day on the second Monday in October.

The Pilgrims’ Thanksgiving can be traced back to the English Harvest Home Festival and Dutch thanksgiving traditions, which some Pilgrims learned about during the ten years they spent in the city of Leyden before coming to America. Today, Thanksgiving is a time for family reunions, most of which center around the preparation of an elaborate meal featuring turkey and a dozen or so accompanying dishes. Although some people go to special church services on Thanksgiving Day, far more line the streets to watch parades or sit in front of the television watching football games. In many American cities and towns, the day after Thanksgiving marks the official start of the Christmas shopping season.

Many rituals were associated with the cutting of the last sheaf of corn at the harvest. At one time, people believed that the corn spirit or corn goddess ran from plant to plant, just ahead of the advancing sickles. Sometimes farmers “caught” the corn spirit by making the last sheaf into a doll, who was believed to possess magical powers. The corn doll was then decorated with ribbons or crowned with a wreath of flowers and hung up on the farmhouse wall until it was time to plow for the next year’s crops. Then the farmer’s wife would cut the doll into pieces and bring it to the fields as food for the horses; or she would burn it, and thefarmer would plow the ashes back into the earth as a way of ensuring a plentiful harvest. In some places, the corn doll would be thrown into a river in the hope that it would guarantee sufficient rainfall.

In America today, small dolls made from corn husks are a popular household decoration at Thanksgiving.

Also known as the “horn of plenty”, the cornucopia is not only a harvest symbol but a symbol of early America, with its seemingly endless supply of game and produce. In ancient Rome, a goat’s horn overflowing with fruit and other foods was an attribute of both Flora, the goddess of flowers, and Fortuna, the goddess of fortune. In Greece, it was associated with Amalthea, a nymph in the form of a goat who nursed the infant Zeus in a cave on the island of Crete. According to legend, Amalthea broke off one of her horns and, filling it with fruits and flowers, gave it to Zeus. To show his gratitude, Zeus set the goat’s image in the sky as the constellation Capricorn. In another version of the myth, the grateful young Zeus breaks off a goat’s horn and gives it to Amalthea, his foster mother, telling her it will supply her with whatever she needs.

Cornucopia—from the Latin cornu copiae , meaning “horn of plenty”—is a long-standing symbol of fruitfulness and abundance. Americans often place cornucopia baskets on their Thanksgiving tables to symbolize their gratitude for the feast they are about to share.

The Pilgrims didn’t know about corn when they first arrived in America, but the Indians showed them how to plant the kernels and fertilize the mounds with fish. Because they didn’t want the Indians to know how many of the original settlers had died that first winter, the Pilgrims planted corn over the graves to disguise them. The ears of maize or Indian corn, as it was known, were small and knobby, with red, yellow, blue, green, and blackish kernels. Sometimes they were roasted and eaten, but more often they were dried and pounded into cornmeal for cornbread and cornmeal mush.

While it is not part of the traditional Thanksgiving menu, Indian corn is a favorite household decoration at this time of year. Although corn is an ancient symbol of fertility, prosperity, and growth, the irregularly shaped and colored Indian corn is a more recent American symbol of the harvest.

The oldest Thanksgiving Day parade, which dates back to 1920, is the one held byGimbel’s department store in Philadelphia. Macy’s department store in New York held its first parade in 1924. Today the Macy’s parade features characters from story books, movies, television, and toyland. In recent years, it has attracted more than three million spectators, while another sixty million Americans have watched it on television. In Hollywood, television and movie stars parade through the streets on floats.

The Pilgrims as seen today—on Thanksgiving posters, greeting cards, paper tablecloths and napkins, and in the form of candles or figurines—wear gray, black, or dun-colored clothing with white collars and cuffs. They have tall black hats with broad brims and a silver buckle in front; their shoes have silver buckles as well. The women and girls usually wear long dresses in drab colors with white aprons and caps. In reality, however, Pilgrim women often wore red, purple, bright blue, or green dresses colored with vegetable dyes. The ornamental buckles seen on the Pilgrims’ hats and shoes weren’t introduced until later in the seventeenth century.

The figures of Pilgrims seen at Thanksgiving today are a symbol of the bravery and determination of America’s earliest settlers. They are often portrayed as male-female couples because they represent the “parents” of the American people.

Perhaps the most famous landmark in America today is the granite boulder on which the Pilgrims first stepped when they came ashore at Plymouth, Massachusetts. But until just before the American Revolution, it was simply another rock. During the next century it was moved first to Plymouth’s town square, then to a local museum known as Pilgrim Hall. Finally it was brought back to the water-front and placed under a stone canopy with a box believed to contain Pilgrim bones. Eventually, to prevent souvenir-hunters from chipping off pieces, the rock was placed in a pit surrounded by an iron railing, with a portico overhead to shelter visitors from the weather.

Whether or not the Pilgrims actually stepped ashore on this rock is not known with any certainty. Plymouth Rock has long symbolized America’s freedom. During the Revolutionary War, the residents of Plymouth took it as a good omen rather than a coincidence when the rock split in two while being pried from its bed for use as a pedestal for a liberty pole: shortly after, the colonies officially split from England. The two halves were eventually reunited under a protective canopy at the foot of Coles Hill, where it now sits. Although originally estimated to have measured twelve feet in diameter and to have weighed seven or eight tons, over the yearsthe rock has been whittled down considerably by souvenir-hunters and the difficulties of moving it.

There is no record of what was eaten at the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving feast. The custom of snapping the turkey’s wishbone, bringing luck to the person who gets the larger half, can be traced back to the Romans. It was certainly a well-established tradition in England by the time the Pilgrims brought it to America. Some word historians believe that the bone-snapping custom gave rise to the popular expression, “to get a lucky break”.

Today, Americans eat more than 690 million pounds of turkey every Thanksgiving, accompanied by such traditional American dishes as cranberries, squash, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, and stuffing （which the Pilgrims referred to as “pudding in the belly”）. After the United States won its independence, Congress debated the choice of a national bird. Benjamin Franklin thought the bald eagle was a bird of “bad moral character”and advocated the turkey as a “true, original Native of North America”.