Good morning Phoenix! Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. To
our family and friends outside the US, I wish you a Happy Friends-giving! Our
friends mean a lot to us.
It’s a TBT – On this day in 1941: President Franklin D.
Roosevelt signs a bill that establishes the fourth Thursday in November as
Thanksgiving Day.
It took a very long time for Thanksgiving to become an
annual event, for it to have a universally accepted date, and for it to be
celebrated as a federal holiday. Various Thanksgiving-type celebrations were
held irregularly during the fall months for nearly 150 years before it was
suggested by the Continental Congress that the country should have a national
day of Thanks. Some historians suggest that this was a political move as much
as anything. The emerging country was in need of its own traditions and customs
to help create a separate non-English, American identity. Thanksgiving was
perfect because it was a way to honor the pilgrims, the people who originally
left England to be free of persecution.
The Thanksgiving holiday has come a long way from its humble
beginnings. Thanksgiving was celebrated during the American Revolution at least
once and George Washington declared a day of thanksgiving in 1789 to mark the
end of the Revolutionary War. The holiday was celebrated by different states at
different times for many years to follow.
While we can’t be sure of when the turkey came into the mix,
there is one key figure who advocated for the bird to be served on Thanksgiving
— Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879).
Not only did Hale, a well-known writer (she penned “Mary Had
a Little Lamb,” among other works), urge families to adopt certain foods like
turkey, but she was also the driving force behind pushing the U.S. government
to adopt Thanksgiving as an official holiday.
In 1863, Abraham Lincoln obliged — and here we are today.
If you are celebrating Thanksgiving, please enjoy your day.
If you are traveling, we wish you safe travels. If you are not celebrating,
please enjoy your day anyway!
Have a fangtastic and turkey-rific day!
<3 Brock V"""V
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