Southampton PA USA – Temperatures.com, Inc. and all its staff and associates takes this time to wish one and all a very Happy Thanksgiving. For those of you not in, or from, the USA it may be new to you. Here’s some more information, if you are interested, about the occasion and its roots.
Thanksgiving day is a unique holiday in the USA. Originally a religious holiday, it has become much more, one that every American child learns about in grade school. It had its beginnings at the very first Thanksgiving in 1623, a feast of thanks to God, that the first permanent settlers in the USA offered after surviving a few bitter winters in the “New England” settlement of Plimouth Colony. In those first few years, nearly half of the original settlers died. The survivors were thankful, indeed, for they had learned with help from the natives how to become self-sustaining in the new, bountiful, but at times, very inhospitable land. The weather extremes were much different than their homeland’s.
“The Day of Thanksgiving and Praise” was one of the three holy days observed by the Pilgrims who had fled religious opression in England to the new land of America.You can read all about it from some of the links below, in what is now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts.
Being originally from New England, this writer has actually experienced a living bit of history by visiting the Plimouth Colony on a Thanksgiving morning a few years ago with my family.
We saw costumed volunteers and historians acting out the typical preparations for the afternoon feast. All had spent the night before living in recreated houses much like the original settlers, utterly devoid of central heating. They had awakened to water frozen in the wash pails.
They were a cheery and informative bunch, very animated and enthusiastic (perhaps they were just trying to get warm) even to speaking with authentic accents that the original colonists had used.
It was, and probably still is a wonderful and interesting experience, especially for a family. The memories are still quite fresh.
At the time I was employed by an English company based in the Midlands and could have sworn that the actors’ accents were very close to the accent I heard in the Lancashire area, or thereabouts, when I had been there only a month or so earlier!
