What year was the first thanksgiving celebrated

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When is Thanksgiving 2021?
When was the first Thanksgiving?
When did Thanksgiving become a national holiday?
Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving?
Does Canada celebrate Thanksgiving?
What time does the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade start?
When was the first Thanksgiving?
Who attended the first Thanksgiving?
What was on the menu at the first Thanksgiving?
When was Thanksgiving made a national holiday?

Thanksgiving travel trouble may be caused by a winter storm.

A winter storm system packing high winds, rain and Arctic air is expected to develop, hitting the Midwest and East coast.

Thanksgiving is about food and football to most Americans.

The Thursday holiday may not exactly hold the warm fuzzy origins we all recall from our youth.

People have many questions about Thanksgiving each year. Here's a look at what people want to know surrounding the holiday.

When is Thanksgiving 2021?

Thursday, Nov. 25.

When was the first Thanksgiving?

Americans cling to the fantastical story of how the Pilgrims and Native Americans celebrated together upon their first meeting in 1621. But many myths exist about the origins of Thanksgiving.

The Wampanoag tribe was never officially invited to a harvest celebration in 1621 and only arrived after hearing the Pilgrims shooting their guns into the air. The Wampanoags thought they were under attack, deciding to stay when they found out it was a celebration.

In fact, not all Native Americans celebrate Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving: What you learned about the ‘first Thanksgiving’ isn’t true. Here’s the real story

When did Thanksgiving become a national holiday?

President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.

Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving?

We've all learned the Pilgrims and the Native Americans came together for a great feast to forge their friendship, but that's not entirely true. The Pilgrims did celebrate the harvest in 1621 but the Native Americans weren't exactly invited.

According to history.com, days of fasting and giving thanks became commonplace among New England settlements on an annual or occasional basis. A far different picture than how we celebrate Thanksgiving today.

Some historians question if the origin of Thanksgiving wasn't even earlier than 1621. However, Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day be held on the last Thursday of November in 1863, "hoping to reconcile a country in the throes of the Civil War." That's why it's national holiday.

Pilgrim myths: Don’t believe everything your kindergarten teacher told you

Does Canada celebrate Thanksgiving?

Yes. According to the Farmers' Almanac, the Canadian Thanksgiving was held Oct. 10 in 2021. Unlike the United States, Canada's Thanksgiving celebrates giving thanks for what the Earth has provided rather than beginnings of a country. However, food is still a mainstay for the celebration.

What time does the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade start?

The 95th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade runs from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern Time on Nov. 25. NBC will air the parade beginning at 9 a.m. in each time zone across the country.

Chris Sims is a digital sports producer at IndyStar. Follow him on Twitter: @ChrisFSims.

This favorite American holiday has come a long way from its first celebration. Florida, Texas, Maine, and Virginia all claim to have hosted the first Thanksgiving. Celebrations of prayer and giving thanks were made between Spanish explorers and English colonists with the Indigenous well before the Mayflower landed, but these events were not widely known until around the 20th century, and they certainly vary from the roasted turkey, annual stuffing recipe, pumpkin pie, and famous parade that we think of now-a-days.

What happened during the first Thanksgiving so many years ago? And when was the first Thanksgiving? We're here to help provide some answers.

When was the first Thanksgiving?

The first Thanksgiving was held between September and November 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Plimouth Plantation. (The town Plymouth, Massachusetts, is spelled differently than the reconstructed museum of Plimouth Plantation because the original spelling of Plimouth by Govenor Bradford was with an i instead of a y.) The English Protestants who arrived in North American in 1620 were a religious sect persecuted in England. After a harsh winter, the Pilgrims had a banner harvest in 1621 due in large part to the help of Squanto, a Native American of the Patuxet tribe who spoke English after years of being enslaved. Squanto showed them how to plant corn and fish on the land that had once belonged to his own tribe, who had been tragically wiped out by smallpox. Using what they had, along with contributions from the native Wampanoag tribe (Squanto's Patuxet was a band of this tribe), they celebrated with three days filled with food, military demonstrations, and games.

Joe Raedle

Whether the Pilgrims invited the native Wampanoag tribe to their feast has been debated, but the Indigenous people likely brought deer and guests to the event. The little we know of those three days comes from this diary entry by Edward Winslow, a leader in the colony:

“And God be praised we had a good increase… Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”

Edward Winslow, Mourt’s Relation: D.B. Heath, ed. Applewood Books. Cambridge, 1986. p 82

But the centuries that followed were not exactly peace-filled when it came to relations between the Indigenous tribes and colonists of North America. As time went on, various days of thanksgiving were called for—sometimes for less-than peaceful reasons, like the safe return of colonists who massacred an Indigenous village just 16 years after that initial celebration described above—but the story we were taught as schoolchildren of the annual peaceful breaking of bread between colonists and Indigenous tribes didn't come around until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Americans began to call for a stronger national identity, a task made easier with a wholesome story to celebrate. The holiday grew to embody the morals that Americans wanted to uphold and promote through an annual meal of gratefulness and plenty.

Who attended the first Thanksgiving?

As you can gather from Winslow’s diary entry, the guest list for the first Thanksgiving ended up with more Wampanoag tribe members than Pilgrims (very different from the many artistic portrayals of the event), as the population of 100 colonists had been cut in half by a harsh winter. Unfortunately, 78 percent of the women died during that first winter, so the event was heavy on the masculine as well, with there ultimately being 22 men, 4 married women (including Edward Winslow’s wife), and more than 25 children and teenagers. This didn’t leave a lot of skilled people to prepare the meal, so we can guess that in addition to the 4 remaining women, children, servants, and unmarried men helped to cook the first Thanksgiving for honored guests like King Massasoit and his 90 men.

Boston Globe

So what did this rag-tag kitchen crew cook up during those fateful three days? From the journal entries of both Winslow and Gov. William Bradford, we can gather that there was a lot of fowl, but whether or not there was actually a turkey on the first Thanksgiving is unknown. Food historians say that it likely was a lot of duck, geese, swan, chicken, and pigeon, which they would put on a spit and roast over the fire. We know that the Wampanoag brought venison and likely items from their harvest, which included things like nuts, beans, pumpkins, and squash. The Pilgrims had been shown how to grow corn by the Wampanoag, so there was lots of corn as well as cornmeal for things like porridge. Because there was no butter or flour, there were no pies, tarts, or bread like the colonists were used to, but they used onions and herbs to stuff the birds and may have even had garlic and carrots. Because this was a three-day affair, it’s assumed that they would have taken the carcasses of the eaten birds and boiled them to make stock in order to make porridge for additional meals throughout the celebrations.

In addition, so close to the sea, they had a plethora of shellfish, oysters, eels, lobster, and fish at their disposal and probably served smoked shellfish to their guests. Unfortunately, they didn’t have potatoes or sweet potatoes because those hadn’t come up from South America yet, and while plain cranberries may have been part of the meal, cranberry sauce as we know it wouldn’t be a thing for another 50 years. Much of what we know as our modern-day Thanksgiving meal has been taken from many different cultures with small pieces of that original event included.

When was Thanksgiving made a national holiday?

The harvest event at Plimouth was sadly only a one-time affair, and it wouldn’t be until 1863 that President Lincoln would declared it a national holiday.

Despite its differences from today’s affair, there are still many opinions about how to celebrate Thanksgiving. For some it’s a celebration of coming together in the midst of a harsh environment, while for others its a reminder of the harsh history in our nation's past treatment of Indigenous peoples. Wherever you land, remember that both the colonists and Wampanoag have histories of celebrating harvests throughout the ages, giving thanks to God, the earth, or to whoever was worshipped for what they had grown and would hopefully sustain them through the winter. Counting one’s blessings, however small, is something that definitely embodies the spirit of the first Thanksgiving.