A Day to Give Thanks

The Good Life

Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday in the United States, and Thanksgiving 2019 occurs on Thursday, November 28. However, Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on a different date. In 1957, the Canadian Parliament proclaimed Thanksgiving to be the second Monday in October, which is called Columbus Day in the United States. 

For Christians, Thanksgiving not only has a patriotic history, but it also has spiritual roots that go back to the Old Testament.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is historically a day to praise and thank God the Father for blessings and to ask Him to heal the wounds of the nation. It was also a national day of penitence to humbly repent for our sinfulness and disobedience.  

Thanksgiving became a national holiday in 1863. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving:

As a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.