Thanksgiving History, Meaning, and the Call for Gratitude in Modern Times.

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(ThyBlackMan.com) The annual American holiday called Thanksgiving formally began with a 1863 proclamation from Abraham Lincoln declaring the last Thursday in November a day of “thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens,” as well as “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience.”

The thought behind Thanksgiving is outward toward God and his blessings and not inward, which suggests gratitude to no one in particular for whatever positives might have occurred in one’s life. In the more secular view these positives are not blessings, but are to be chalked up to luck, or “good fortune.” May “The Force” be with you.

Most presidents after Lincoln generally followed the pattern of giving thanks to the Deity, even and especially during wars and economic downturns.

In 1939, in the midst of The Great Depression and a looming World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was still able to proclaim: “Let us, on the day set aside for this purpose, give thanks to the Ruler of the Universe for the strength which He has vouchsafed us to carry on our daily labors and for the hope that lives within us of the coming of a day when peace and the productive activities of peace shall reign on every continent.”

That optimistic sentiment was reinforced in the Vera Lynn song “The White Cliffs of Dover,” which contained this lyric:

“There’ll be love and laughter

And peace ever after

Tomorrow

When the world is free”

If only.

Roosevelt also declared Thanksgiving to be on the fourth Thursday of the month in years when the calendar contained five Thursdays to allow more time for Christmas shopping which he thought would help boost the economy.

Even in this month when Thanksgiving comes naturally late on the calendar, advertisers have been declaring “Black Friday” sales beginning in October.As noted by The American Presidency Project, beginning in the early 1940s, “the language of Thanksgiving Day Proclamations changed to emphasize American values and ideas, and to assert the event’s direct link to the ‘first Thanksgiving’ of Plymouth Colony.”Many myths have grown around Thanksgiving, The Mayflower, and other historical events. The Museum Gallery Archive reports: “Four hundred years ago, Thanksgiving was a religious event, and marked by fasting not feasting. Recent research suggests that the first Thanksgiving of this kind was celebrated by new English settlers at Berkeley, Virginia, in 1619. They were Puritans giving thanks for their safe arrival on the banks of the James River.”

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Today, Thanksgiving is nearly a blur in the rush toward Christmas and the conspicuous consumption merchants promote to pad their bottom lines. It’s too bad because pausing to reflect amid the toxic political environment we have experienced this year – and are likely to continue to experience in at least the near future – is a way to cleanse us from the poison that has infected so many. It is also a way to turn our attention from things on Earth that must pass away to the One who is eternal and in control of all things.

Eugenio says:

November 27, 2024 at 10:19 pm

let’s be realistic America!

Thanksgiving was actually the massacre of Native American Indians during a threaty of peace at a banquest between leaders of several Indian tribes and the white men. The Native America indians who are the original people of the north America before the white man set foot were living their normal live with over 80 million inhabitants and by the time the white men came and settle down in this new world and as of 2024, there are only or better yet less than 7 million native Americans left alive in America.

So the question of the day is Since when does a population decreases unless they are massacre, poison, remove from their lands, steriize or for a better term exterminate into a genocide similar to the Jewish holocaust. Yes, Racist America sign over 400 threaties with the Native American indians tribes and every single treaty was broken by the white men and the white men was behind the genocide, extermination, rape, tortured, sterilization, castration, child molestation of all native american indians in north Ameerica; thus, resulting in the decline of the indian population.

So, when you as a black men, women, LGBT celebrate thanksgiving, you are actually celebrating the death and genocide of millions of native americans and the victory and supremacy of whtie people over minorities. Likewise, the whtie men brought millions of black slaves to america and half of them perish at the ruthless and evil hands of whtie men and white women. So, never forget and never allow the mainstream media to brainwashed you into celebrating the deaths of innnocent people via the use of Thanksgiving, Christmas, New years and any other holiday created out of the thin air by our Racist American System.