Thanksgiving, as a U.S. national holiday, grew out of harvest and religious “days of thanksgiving” that began in colonial New England, especially among English settlers in what is now Massachusetts and surrounding colonies, with a famous early feast held in 1621 at Plymouth between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people. Similar thank‑you services and meals were also held earlier in other parts of what is now the United States and Canada, such as Spanish and English ceremonies in Florida and Virginia and a 1578 thanksgiving by Martin Frobisher’s expedition in present‑day Canada, but these did not directly become the basis of the modern U.S. holiday.
Early thanksgiving traditions
- Indigenous peoples across North America had long‑standing traditions of ceremonies and gatherings to give thanks for harvests and the natural world well before European colonization.
- European colonists brought Christian “days of thanksgiving” and fasts, which they held to mark safe voyages, military events, or good harvests in various locations, including Florida, Virginia, and New England.
Plymouth and New England
- The best‑known early event was a three‑day harvest feast in 1621 at Plymouth (in today’s Massachusetts), shared by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag; later generations retroactively treated this as “the first Thanksgiving,” even though it was not originally named that way.
- Over the 1600s and 1700s, New England colonies held periodic civil thanksgiving days in late fall, blending religious services with large communal meals, and these regional practices became the main roots of the modern American Thanksgiving.
From regional to national holiday
- By the 19th century, these New England thanksgiving customs had spread with migrants across the United States, helping normalize an autumn day of thanks focused on family gatherings and feasting.
- In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a recurring national Thanksgiving Day during the Civil War, formalizing an already evolving tradition that started in colonial New England and later became fixed as the late‑November holiday observed today.
