The Guns of Thanksgiving

Our modern version of Thanksgiving is the result of a campaign by a prominent editor in the 1860s named Sarah Josepha Hale, who also wrote "Mary Had A Little Lamb." She was known as "a woman of masculine energy." Then she was forgotten.

The Pilgrims brought thanksgivings events with them from England, where fasting and harvest festivals were intended by the pious to replace dubious pagan holidays like Christmas and Easter.  

From day one the Puritans and then others held occasional secular and religious thanksgiving fasts and feasts to celebrate whatever seemed important to them, often military victories. President Washington suggested that states put together thanksgiving holidays.  Thanksgiving remained a locally scheduled series of holidays, not regularized into one federal holiday until Lincoln did it in 1863. That was not our most thankful year. A great number of young Americans were killing one another. 

From colonial days onward some parts of the South resisted this Yankee holiday.  

Canada and many other countries influenced by Europe have their own versions of Thanksgiving, but it isn't such a big deal. 

In 1941 Congress made the holiday permanent in the United States. 

As far as I know, the fasting, feasting and giving of thanks to Jesus have had little to do with America's original settlers. If your school made you don a onesy and war bonnet and participate in a Thanksgiving pageant, forget about it. You should have been waving a musket and wearing a powdered wig.