Have you ever celebrated a holiday and not really given much thought to it's origin?  Contrary to popular belief, Thanksgiving was not meant to be celebrated by marathon shopping or watching football.  Although interestingly, in 1939 President Roosevelt moved the date of Thanksgiving a week earlier.  He wanted to make a longer Christmas season for the retail industry.  This change was thought to give merchants more time to sell goods before Christmas, and Roosevelt hoped it would help bring the country out of the Depression.  Two years later, Congress changed the holiday permanently to the fourth Thursday of November.

Both Canada and the U.S. celebrate Thanksgiving to recognize and give thanks for our many blessings.  But the first Thanksgiving in both countries was held for entirely different reasons.

The first Canadian Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1578 by English explorers to give thanks for surviving the long sea voyage.  In the years to follow, as settlers started arriving, they continued these ceremonies.  In 1957 Parliament proclaimed "A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed, to be observed on the second Monday in October".  In Canada, giving thanks for a successful harvest falls earlier than the U.S. due to the simple fact that Canada is further north, and fall and winter arrive much earlier.

The first U.S. Thanksgiving was held because the Pilgrims wanted to thank the local Indians for teaching them how to survive in their new country.  The Pilgrims had sailed to North America from England, searching for a home they could practice their style of religion freely.  Popular belief has it that Plymouth Rock was the site of the original colony;  this is incorrect for when they arrived at Plymouth Rock the natives greeted them with much hostility.  They put back out to sea almost at once, and a little further south, they came across Cape Cod, a much more favorable anchorage than Plymouth and a native population which was much friendlier.

That initial harsh Massachusetts winter killed approximately half of the original 102 colonists.  In order not to let the Native Americans who lived nearby know how much their ranks had shrunk, they buried their dead in the dark.