HAPPY THANKSGIVING! IT IS THE NIGHT OF...

Sorry, that I missed the ‘DAY OF’, but I had a good excuse, I didn’t want to disturb your dinners. Any-who, let’s try to be wiser on why and when we actually started celebrating this HOLIDAY! “In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states.” It was President Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War in 1863, who was the man behind the idea of making it a legal HOLIDAY and that it would be held in November. To read more go to: http://www.history.com/topics/thanksgiving And I bet most of you thought it was just another excuse to get a four day HOLIDAY weekend and watch football for all those days while eating your fill of turkey sandwiches and fixings until Monday morning, hmm? Sure I know that you too knew the true meaning of Thanksgiving…it’s when we declared genocide and stole Native Americans land from people who just wanted to become our friends…That sounds rather harsh, hmm? Well, many truly believe that is the whole truthful story of what happened and to my recent further investigating into it I do believe that it does show quite a bit of merit, but you all knew that, true? Sadly, our ancestors where shamefully blatant in trying to make a new life for themselves in the new land… All those who truly believe theirs came over on the Mayflower must realize that the entire ship had no more room than for 102 passengers and 30 crewmen. And so I don’t know how so many claim fame to that? I meet people all of the time that brag that they are from an old family that came over in the year 1620 November after a two month slow harsh trip and they landed in Massachusetts. To read more go to: http://www.mayflowerhistory.com/History/voyage_secondary.php “Relations with Native Americans The native inhabitants of the region around Plymouth Colony were the various tribes of the Wampanoag people, who had lived there for some 10,000 years before the Europeans arrived. Soon after the Pilgrims built their settlement, they came into contact with Tisquantum, or Squanto, an English-speaking Native American. Squanto was a member of the Pawtuxet tribe (from present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island) who had been seized by the explorer John Smith's men in 1614-15. Meant for slavery, he somehow managed to escape to England, and returned to his native land to find most of his tribe had died of plague. In addition to interpreting and mediating between the colonial leaders and Native American chiefs (including Massasoit, chief of the Pokanoket), Squanto” taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn, which became an important crop, as well as where to fish and hunt beaver. In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims famously shared a harvest feast with the Pokanokets; the meal is now considered the basis for the Thanksgiving holiday.” “Other tribes, such as the Massachusetts and Narragansetts, were not so well disposed towards European settlers, and Massasoit's alliance with the Pilgrims disrupted relations among Native American peoples in the region. Over the next decades, relations between settlers and Native Americans deteriorated as the former group occupied more and more land. By the time William Bradford died in 1657, he had already expressed anxiety that New England would soon be torn apart by violence. In 1675, Bradford's predictions came true, in the form of King Philip's War. (Philip was the English name of Metacomet, the son of Massasoit and leader of the Pokanokets since the early 1660s.) That conflict left some 5,000 inhabitants of New England dead, three quarters of those Native Americans. In terms of percentage of population killed, King Philip's War was more than twice as costly as the American Civil War and seven times more so than the American Revolution.” To read more go to: http://www.history.com/topics/pilgrims Who said I was just another pretty face? No one. On that note of I hope WOW’ ing you all with more historic info that you too could easily Google, allow me to be the first to wish you all a very happy good night and ask you to kindly count all your blessings and share all your overages and I will too! And next time please be here or be square, ya hear? PS My idea was to make easy access for all those kiddies there in your home today!