Thanksgiving: November 26, 2009

The tradition of thanking God for the year's harvest at autumn was already a well developed practice in Europe during medieval times. In some countries a part of this practice included lighting up bonfires, dancing and eating so that to be fit for the winter to come.
The first known thanksgiving feast or festival in North America was celebrated by Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and the people he called "Tejas", on 23 of May, 1541, in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, to celebrate his expedition's discovery of food supplies. In the sense of a feast in gratitude to God celebrated by Europeans in North America, this has a claim to be the true first North American Thanksgiving. The next was apparently celebrated a quarter-century later, on September 8, 1565, in St. Augustine, Florida. When Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed, he and his men shared a feast with the aboriginal peoples.

In Great Britain Thanksgiving is another name for the Harvest Festival, held in churches across the land on a relevant Sunday to mark the end of the local harvest. This tradition was taken to North America by early settlers, and today in Canada and the USA this has become Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving Day, an annual one-day holiday to give thanks at the close of the harvest season.

Thus, Thanksgiving is related to Harvest festivals that had long been a traditional holiday in much of Europe. The first known North American celebration of these traditional festivals by Europeans was held in Newfoundland by Martin Frobisher and his expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1578, and Canadians trace their Thanksgiving to that festival. In the United States, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. In Canada, it is celebrated on the second Monday in October.

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