Thanksgiving

History
In the early 1600s, everyone had to go to the same church with the same religion. A group of
people in England wanted to be free in this (Puritans), the name of their group was called
‘the Pilgrims’. Around 100 people left their homeland for this. They sailed to the New World.
On the 11th of December, they landed in Plymouth after their long journey (six weeks). It was
a long and cold winter, the Pilgrims has a hard time. The Native Americans helped them with
seeds, food, houses, surviving etc. The first year, lots of Pilgrims died. The Pilgrims planted
crops (with the seeds and plants they got). To celebrate their good fortune, they had a feast
of thanksgiving (three days). The Pilgrims cooked for the Native Americans, as thank for their
help. Everyone had a good day on Thanksgiving.

In 1621 this feast is often called ‘first thanksgiving’. The day we now celebrate as
Thanksgiving became a tradition in the US. In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt made
Thanksgiving a national holiday and it is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November.

How did I celebrate it

This year was the first year I heard about Thanksgiving, so also the first time I celebrated it.
With the Thanksgiving of this year, I had breakfast with all the tto classes of year 2. Per class
every person took two things for breakfast, so you finally have a nice breakfast with all kinds
of different foods and drinks. On the day of Thanksgiving, everyone was sitting together, we
ate and at the same time, we could talk and have some fun. Except for breakfast we also
wrote odes to someone in our class. An ode is a kind of poetry you write to a thing or person
to say how much you love the thing or person. So everyone wrote an ode to someone else,
later (while we had breakfast on the day of thanksgiving) you got the ode that someone
wrote to you. I really liked this way of celebrating Thanksgiving, we all had a lot of fun. I
would definitely like it to do this again next year.