We Gather Together To Ask For God's Blessing

A Tribute to America the Bountiful

It has been said that Thanksgiving is the most American of all the holidays. On the fourth Thursday of November, we gather with family and friends to to share that for which we are thankful over the most elaborate and symbolic meal of the year.

While today's festivities include many things unimaginable to the earliest celebrants--parades, football, and the official start to the Christmas shopping season--in many ways, our modern celebration continues to honor many of the traditions symbolic of the first Thanksgiving. In 1621 the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast. In addition to being a symbol of the cooperation between the English colonists and the Native Americans, it was very much in keeping with a long tradition of celebrating the harvest and giving thanks for a successful bounty of crops.

Let Us Give Thanks

George Washington, beloved general and first president certainly understood that we were a nation blessed in so many ways. In keeping with earlier proclamations, he gave thanks or God’s providence in the events of the nation, and in his Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1789, "for the many signal favors of Almighty God" in the lives of the people.

On this Thanksgiving Day, our thoughts invariably turn to food, and we give thanks for the bounty before us. Let us not forget that everything before us is the product of hard work--from the planting to the harvesting to the production to the the delivery--of many individuals across this great land of ours. Today, we celebrate and give thanks for the bounty they bestow.

May God continue to bless them and keep them in his ever bountiful grace.