What Is Thanksgiving

Celebrated in Canada and the United States, Thanksgiving is a fall harvest festival that has become traditionally linked with food, family and football. Thanksgiving also traditionally includes an elaborate Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey and all the trimmings.

The celebration doesn't have a fixed date: for the US it falls on the last Thursday of November, in case the month has four Thursdays, of in the last but one, in the rare cases when there are five Thursdays in the month. So, here are the Thanksgiving dates for the next few years:

• 2010: November 25th
• 2011: November 24th
• 2012: November 22nd
• 2013: November 28th
• 2014: November 27th
• 2015: November 26th

In America the first Thanksgiving is often attributed to the feast shared between the surviving Mayflower pilgrims and their Wampanoag neighbors in 1621. However, an even earlier Thanksgiving celebration had occurred in Canada in 1578, when explorer Martin Frobisher hosted a formal feast to give thanks after surviving the difficult journey to Newfoundland.Scholastic: The First Thanksgiving Feast

Thanksgiving, as well as other harvest festivals could have their origins in the ancient belief of farmers that crops contain spirits http://www.holidays.net/thanksgiving/story.htm, which would be released in the harvesting process, and which needed to be annihilated in order not to throw their revenge upon the farmers and their families.

Thanksgiving has come to mean many different things to different people over the centuries. Many bring families and friends together to give thanks for the little things, while others focus on the feast! It is often treated as a time to express thankfulness for life's blessings. Lately, the Thanksgiving celebration entered into the business world, many companies making it a habit from sending Thanksgiving cards to their customers and partners.

Although the original signification of the Thanksgiving has somehow been lost, the holiday is one of the opportunities for families to get closer together over a lavish dinner, one of those special evenings when forgiveness, peace and well-being rule over the other feelings we might experience throughout the year.

As it happens for all holidays, the week after Thanksgiving people are trying to re-purpose their food leftovers, so this is why websites that publish such leftover ham recipes http://leftoverhamrecipes.info or other similar ones get a spike of traffic during that time of year.