Through out the world, people celebrate the thanks giving day, but in different ways. In southern India, it's been celebrated as "Pongal".
In US, the first Thanks giving was celebrated in 1621, by the Plymouth colonists, who came from England, & the Wampanoag, the American Indians.
In the present day, when we speak of Thanks Giving, Turkey & Pumpkin Pie are the 2 things that primarily come into our mind. Surprisingly, turkey was not their main dish, in the first thanks giving. They had different types of meat, dried corn, fish and herbs.
When we go deep into the origin of thanks giving day, it was primarily celebrated as a harvest festival & as a religious one, a day of thanks giving to God in a speacial way. It was based on the New England puritan Thanksgiving, which is a religious Thanksgiving. This festival was brought into America by the English Colonists.
On Dec. 4, 1619, a group of 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Plantation, on the James River near what is now Charles City, Va. The first dreadful winter in Massachusetts had killed about half the members of the colony. But new hope arose in the summer of 1621. The settlers expected a good corn harvest, despite poor crops of peas, wheat, and barley. Thus, in early autumn, governor William Bradford arranged a harvest festival to give thanks to God for the progress the colony had made.
They didn't eat in courses as we do today. All of the different types of foods were placed on the table at the same time and people ate in any order they chose. Sometimes there were two courses, but each of them would contain both meat dishes, puddings, and sweets. The festival was celebrated for three days.
The original feast in 1621 occurred sometime between September 21 and November 11. The event was based on English harvest festivals, which traditionally occurred around the 29th of September. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the date for Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November in 1939. Abraham Lincoln had previously designated it as the last Thursday in November, which may have correlated it with the November 21, 1621, anchoring of the Mayflower at Cape Cod.
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