Caching Thru the Holidays: Happy Thanksgiving! Traditional Cache
Chickahominy: Thanks for all of the finds.
Caching Thru the Holidays: Happy Thanksgiving!
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Magnetic Park & Grab
Look for the other caches in this series along the Grand
Strand:
Caching Thru the Holidays:
Happy Halloween! -GC2H77F
Happy Birthday- Loris GC2H837
Happy Easter - Longs - GC2HMDT
Saint Patrick’s Day - Myrtle Beach - GC2HMFC
Thanksgiving began when Pilgrims and Native Americans gathered
together to celebrate a successful harvest. The first Thanksgiving
was held in the fall of 1621, sometime between September 21 and
November 11, and was a three-day feast. The Pilgrims were joined by
approximately 90 of the local Wampanoag tribe, including Chief
Massasoit, in celebration. They ate fowl and deer for certain and
most likely also ate berries, fish, clams, plums, and boiled
pumpkin.
Though the current holiday of Thanksgiving was based on the 1621
feast, it did not immediately become an annual celebration or
holiday. Sporadic days of Thanksgiving followed, usually declared
locally to give thanks for a specific event such as the end of a
drought, victory in a specific battle, or after a harvest.
It wasn't until October 1777 that all 13 colonies celebrated a day
of Thanksgiving. The very first national day of Thanksgiving was
held in 1789, when President George Washington proclaimed Thursday,
November 26 to be "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer," to
especially give thanks for the opportunity to form a new nation and
the establishment of a new constitution.
We owe the modern concept of Thanksgiving to a woman named Sarah
Josepha Hale. Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book and author of the
famous "Mary Had a Little Lamb" nursery rhyme, spent 40 years
advocating for a national, annual Thanksgiving holiday. In the
years leading up to the Civil War, she saw the holiday as a way to
infuse hope and belief in the nation and the constitution. So, when
the United States was torn in half during the Civil War and Lincoln
was searching for a way to bring the nation together, he discussed
the matter with Hale.
On October 3, 1863, Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving Proclamation that
declared the last Thursday in November (based on Washington's date)
to be a day of "thanksgiving and praise." For the first time,
Thanksgiving became a national, annual holiday with a specific
date.
For 75 years after Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation,
succeeding presidents honored the tradition and annually issued
their own Thanksgiving Proclamation, declaring the last Thursday in
November as the day of Thanksgiving. However, in 1939, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt did not. In 1939, the last Thursday of
November was going to be November 30. Retailers complained to FDR
that this only left 24 shopping days to Christmas and begged him to
push Thanksgiving just one week earlier. It was determined that
most people do their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving and
retailers hoped that with an extra week of shopping, people would
buy more.
So when FDR announced his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1939, he
declared the date of Thanksgiving to be Thursday, November 23, the
second-to-last Thursday of the month.
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