Thanksgiving Holiday | Rapp Report Daily Wrap-up 0025 | Striving for Eternity

Welcome to The Wrap Up Daily Edition, where we provide a quick biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity.

The Origins of Thanksgiving and Why It Was Set Apart

So this is the weekly wrap-up for a special week. This in America is Thanksgiving, and we are giving a weekly wrap-up for the Thanksgiving. This is a wrap-up of our daily episodes that we wrap up once for folks, so you can grab all of it in one shot and share this one episode for all of the dailies.

Now, this week we talked about Thanksgiving. We're going to talk about its origins. We're going to talk about its traditions. We're going to talk about the holiday itself. Give you guys some things maybe you don't think about with it.

What we want to do is help you to appreciate why we do give thanks on Thanksgiving. Well, it's Thanksgiving week, y 'all, and we are going to be discussing, well, the holiday known as Thanksgiving this week.

What I want to do this year, next year I want to look at the different scripture verses, possibly. But this year I want to talk about the actual holiday, Thanksgiving, how it came about. There's a lot, especially for us as Christians, that we can learn from the historical roots of Thanksgiving.

Now, in September 1620, there was a small ship called the Mayflower that left Plymouth, England. It was carrying 102 passengers, and it was on its way to Virginia. Now, by the way, they didn't have Google Maps back then, and so they ended up in Massachusetts quite a ways off.

They ended up landing at Massachusetts, where they ended up establishing a colony. That was a rough winter, and many of them were not ready for the hardships of Massachusetts, not realizing what the weather would be like and how to properly plant and care for the land.

They ended up having about 57 of those 102 passengers pass away in the first year. Picture the hardship of that. Half the people were gone in one year. And they ended up having an Indian tribe that helped them to learn how to cultivate the land.

And in such, on November 22nd, Thursday, 1621, you have the first Thanksgiving that was celebrated. It was pilgrims who wanted to honor God and thank the Indians that helped them. When we think about Thanksgiving, we think of pilgrims with people with these funny hats that dressed very differently, and we all refer to them as pilgrims and often don't think who they were.

Well, they were Puritans, primarily. Puritans were people who wanted to live a pure life before Christ. And they, in England, were chased out because there were battles going on between the English, who wanted the Roman Catholic Church to rule, and the Reformers, who wanted the Bible to rule.

And so what you end up seeing is that there was a battle going on that forced, under Bloody Mary, many pilgrims or Puritans to flee England or die. Many did go to their death, and many fled, many of which fled to the New World.

And as they came to the New World, having to have to deal with a lot of difficulties that we don't often think about in our day and age, where we can go to a grocery store and just get whatever we need, the reality was that they didn't have that.

They had to go to a land where no one had lived before. There were no houses. They ended up having to build more cemeteries than huts. They put more coffins than huts. In other words, that first year they buried more people than they had for living houses.

And so that's a thing to think about, these Puritans and what they did to come to America, fleeing Christian persecution from the Roman Catholics in England. So the first Thanksgiving was in 1621. You may not realize that it wasn't until 1863, under President Abraham Lincoln, that it was proclaimed a national holiday.

Sarah Hale, Abraham Lincoln, and the National Holiday

It hadn't actually been celebrated in 1622. No, it was 1623 when Governor Bradford called for a religious fast because of the fact that there was a long and threatening drought that year that was threatening harvest.

And he called for a religious fast. And the breaking of that was a time of thanksgiving. But that ended up starting a time of giving thanks. It was not universal throughout all the colonies. They celebrated at different times, always in November it seemed.

But you end up seeing that our country didn't actually have a holiday known as Thanksgiving. But thanks to a woman, Sarah Hale, and we're going to get to her a little bit more on the next episode. But what you see with her is she put on a 30-year letter writing campaign.

Who is she? Well, you may know of her. She is the author of a nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb. She spent 30 years writing to Congress to make the holiday Thanksgiving a holiday, to nationalize it.

And it was Abraham Lincoln who finally had done that. She did so because she had read about the Puritans and saw what they had done and wanted to have a day of thanksgiving for what they had done when they came to this country.

Tomorrow, we're going to talk about what they ate. Now, we mentioned that for over 30 years, Sarah Hale had a letter writing campaign. It was actually 36 years that she had been writing to governors, senators, and presidents to make a national holiday known as Thanksgiving.

Abraham Lincoln finally gave in to that request in 1863 at the height of the Civil War. And he gave a proclamation entreating all Americans to ask God to, quote, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife, unquote.

And he created this holiday to, quote, heal the wounds of the nation, unquote. That is where we see that start. And you end up seeing that they came up with this. They didn't celebrate it with the original food.

Most people think of Thanksgiving with cranberries and turkeys and things like that, stuffing. And yet, that wouldn't have been on the first Thanksgiving. The first Thanksgiving, they would have had venison.

They might have had corn, maybe cranberries, but they wouldn't have been the way we have it today. And so you see that that actually came from Sarah Hale. She had been in her 30 years of writing. She ended up coming up with recipes for a Thanksgiving dinner.

The first Thanksgiving was actually celebrated over about three days, but it was Abraham Lincoln that started the first national Thanksgiving. When do we first see it in America? We actually saw it first by a president known as George Washington.

He's the first in 1789 to establish a Thanksgiving, but it wasn't a national holiday. Have you stuffed your face now with your Thanksgiving Day turkey? Many don't realize that what Thanksgiving was really about was people giving thanks to God for the much that he provided, and we do it celebrating one another.

From Three Days of Thanksgiving to a One-Day Holiday

Now, that first Thanksgiving was, well, three days long, and we just make it a one-day dinner. Now, what some people may not realize is that Thanksgiving was the fourth Thursday of the month since Abraham Lincoln, up until, believe it or not, 1939.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to move up the holiday one week to spur on retail sales in a time during the Great Depression. He was trying to use it for economic gains. That actually came under some hardship.

People didn't quite like that, and so because of the opposition, in 1941, he regulated it, and for the first time, it became the fourth Thursday of the month. There's very few of us that are old enough to remember having the Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of the month.

You'd have to be, well, in your 90s, probably, 70 years old or older to remember that, and so the reality is you end up seeing that the holiday became about football and marketing. Football because the NFL had started, and what they did to try to promote the NFL was create a football game on that day, and that has become the tradition.

It's about Thanksgiving Day turkey and football, and what's it also known for? Well, marketing. It is known for Black Friday now, for the day that people go and start their Christmas shopping, and it has lost the real goal of giving thanks to God.

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