Thanksgiving is an American tradition that traces back to the Christian roots. In 1623, after harvest season, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth, Mass proclaimed "All ye Pilgrims with your wives and littles ones, do gather at the Meeting House... and render Thanksgiving to the Almighty God for all his blessing."  Many years later, on October 3, 1863, the 16th President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, by Act of Congress, an annual National Day of Thanksgiving "on the last Thursday of November" as a day of Thanksgiving.  As you know that was the time of Civil War.  Before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861, seven slave states based on cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy and the remaining states became the Union. The Civil War began the following month April.  Although slavery was the central reason of escalating tension, the war was mainly about the economic domination against each other. Bloody combat was still going on in 1863 and President Abraham proclaimed National Day of Thanksgiving, lamenting, "those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord... But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, by the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own..."  Even during an economic recession, we live in an awfully affluent society. Let's still remember that.