Thanksgiving preparations continue apace.  I grew up in New England, and my aunt and uncle have a place in Plymouth, and cousins have places in that area too- they all use to participate in reenactments at Plymouth Plantation when they were children. But what was that really all based on?  The wolf wants to know…..

Let us remember that Prayers of thanks and special thanksgiving ceremonies are common among almost all cultures and spiritual traditions after harvests and at other times.^[1] 

The info below holds some interesting tidbits- including for starters that Thanksgiving was originally intended as a Day of FASTING! 


The Thanksgiving holiday's history in North America is rooted in English traditions dating from the Protestant Reformation. In the English tradition, days of thanksgiving and special thanksgiving religious services became important during the English Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII and in reaction to the large number of religious holidays on the Catholic calendar.
 Before 1536 there were 95 Church holidays, plus 52 Sundays, when people were required to attend church and forego work and sometimes pay for expensive celebrations. The 1536 reforms reduced the number of Church holidays to 27, but some Puritans, the radical reformers of their age, wished to completely eliminate all Church holidays, including Christmas and Easter. 
The holidays were to be replaced by specially called Days of Fasting or Days of Thanksgiving, in response to events that the Puritans viewed as acts of special providence. Unexpected disasters or threats of judgement from on high called for Days of Fasting. Special blessings, viewed as coming from God, called for Days of Thanksgiving. For example, Days of Fasting were called on account of drought in 1611, floods in 1613, and plagues in 1604 and 1622. 
 Pilgrims and Puritans who began emigrating from England in the 1620s and 1630s carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England. Several days of Thanksgiving were held in early New England history that have been identified as the "First Thanksgiving", including Pilgrim holidays in Plymouth in 1621 and 1623, and a Puritan holiday in Boston in 1631.^[8][9]
Many of the Pilgrims who migrated to the Plymouth Plantation had resided in the city of Leiden from 1609–1620, many of whom had recorded their births, marriages and deaths at the Pieterskerk. In 1608 a group of English religious dissenters fled to the Netherlands. They had left the Anglican church a few years before and had founded their own religious community.

After living in Leiden for eleven years, they decided to become 'pilgrims' and cross the wide waters to America, where they might worship God in their own way and still be Englishmen.

The great adventure started in Delfshaven, on 21 July 1620. There a ship awaited them, the Speedwell, that was bound for America. According to the chronicles the community knelt down in prayer on the quay near the church, that was later to be named after them, Pilgremsvaderkerk.
To commemorate all this, a non-denominational Thanksgiving Day service is held each year on the morning of the American Thanksgiving Day in the Pieterskerk, a Gothic church in Leiden, to commemorate the hospitality the Pilgrims received in Leiden on their way to the New World.- here is Pieterskerk, and an interior view below.