Editor’s note: Trick-or-treating and other Halloween festivities are barely in our memories when many start to think about, talk about and plan for Christmas. Often, Thanksgiving seems almost forgotten, sandwiches between a pair of major retail holidays that simply overshadow the fourth Thursday in November.
Thanksgiving traces its origins to a 1621 harvest feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts, but it didn’t become a national holiday until President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it in 1863. Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November to be a national Thanksgiving Day, and a 1941 congressional resolution officially set the holiday to be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.
The United States was in the midst of its Civil War when Lincoln proclaimed the first official Thanksgiving holiday. Despite the horrors of war, Americans could still be grateful for the good fortunes found in their daily lives.
“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies,” Lincoln proclaimed. “To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.”
The severity of the war could easily have overshadowed the graces bestowed on the citizens of the nation.
“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people,” Lincoln concluded. “I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
“And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.”
For a decade now, NEW Media has asked community members to write a short essay titled “Why I Give Thanks,” originally titled “Bountiful Blessings.”
These are personal reflections, but they also speak to issues and beliefs that many of us share. They are as interesting for how they are the same as for how they are different.
It is especially important for the editorial and advertising team at NEW Media to say “Thank you” to these writers.
Thank you for showing us, again, how gratitude connects us all.
From everyone at NEW Media, a very happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
This year's essayists are:
