History of Thanksgiving
The very first Thanksgiving was not “Thanksgiving” at all, but rather a three-day festival celebrating the Pilgrims’ first bountiful harvest in America aided by the neighboring Native Americans, a tribe known as the Wamapanoag.
On October of 1777, all of the thirteen colonies joined in a one-time thanksgiving celebration. George Washington then declared a National Day of Thanksgiving in 1789. Finally, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln instituted the last Thursday in November to be celebrated nationally as a day of thanksgiving. In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving Day forward one week, and this is the time that we currently celebrate it.