Thanksgiving Gratitude

Gratitude Holiday

On September 28, 1789, just before leaving for recess, the first Federal Congress passed a resolution asking that the President of the United States recommend to the nation a day of thanksgiving. A few days later, President George Washington issued a proclamation naming Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a "Day of Public Thanksgiving" - the first time Thanksgiving was celebrated under the new Constitution. Congress Establishes Thanksgiving | National Archives

Over 95,000 Americans died for freedom from religious and governmental tyranny during the Revolutionary War. More soldiers died from disease and famine than combat. It's believed as many Indians died during the war with some tribes fighting for the British. A combined 50,000 white indentured servants and black slaves were given their freedom to take up arms against the British. For the first time in the history of world, integrated people of race, color, and creed fought together for freedom.

It wasn't until December 26, 1941 that President Roosevelt signed the resolution establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the Federal Thanksgiving Day holiday. While we no longer celebrate a harvest, we still celebrate the blessings of the past year. Thanksgiving is not a Christian holiday, but it is a day for unity and often the highest travel day of the year.

Thanksgiving Quotes

1. “Gratitude means thankfulness, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures, and acknowledging everything that you receive. It means learning to live your life as if everything were a miracle, and being aware on a continuous basis of how much you’ve been given.” ~ Marelisa Fábrega

2. “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” ~ Melody Beattie

3. “In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.”?~ Elizabeth Gilbert

4. “And when I give thanks for the seemingly microscopic, I make a place for God to grow within me.” ~ Ann Voskamp

5. “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”?~ Epicurus

6. “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

7. “I see the glass half full and thank God for what I have.” ~ Ana Monnar

8. “Gratitude and love are always multiplied when you give freely. It is an infinite source of contentment and prosperous energy.”?~ Jim Fargiano

9. “He who thanks but with the lips

Thanks but in part;

The full, the true Thanksgiving

Comes from the heart.”

~ J.A. Shedd

10. “The unthankful heart… discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!” ~ Henry Ward Beecher

11. “It is literally true, as the thankless say, that they have nothing to be thankful for. He who sits by the fire, thankless for the fire, is just as if he had no fire. Nothing is possessed save in appreciation, of which thankfulness is the indispensable ingredient. But a thankful heart hath a continual feast.” ~ W.J. Cameron

12. “To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.” ~ Johannes A. Gaertner

13. “God has two dwellings; one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart.” ~ Izaak Walton

14. “Thanksgiving is nothing if not a glad and reverent lifting of the heart to God in honor and praise for His goodness.” ~ Robert Casper Lintner

15. “We tend to forget that happiness doesn’t come as a result of getting something we don’t have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.”?~ Frederick Keonig

16. “You say, ‘If I had a little more, I should be very satisfied.’ You make a mistake. If you are not content with what you have, you would not be satisfied if it were doubled.”?~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

17. “Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.” –William Faulkner

18. “Gratitude is the memory of the heart.” ~ Massieu

19. “If you never learned the lesson of thankfulness, begin now. Sum up your mercies; see what provision God has made for your happiness, what opportunities for your usefulness, and what advantages for your success.” ~ Ida S. Taylor

20. “Gratitude is an art of painting an adversity into a lovely picture.” – Kak Sri

21. “Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that is already present.” – Marelisa Fábrega

22. “In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and all I have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.” ~ Henri Nouwen

23. “Clearly, one of the major obstacles to our experience of gratitude is the habit we have of sleepwalking through life. The truth is that we are never lacking for blessings in our lives, but we are often lacking in awareness and recognition of them.” ~ Rev. Diane Berke, Ph.D

24. “In the moments we are awake to the wonder of simply being alive, gratitude flows, no matter our circumstances.” ~ M.J. Ryan

25. “Each day, each season, each cycle offers something of beauty. Let us notice and give thanks.” – Diane Mariechild

26. “The focus of Thanksgiving should be a reflection of how our lives have been made so much more comfortable by the sacrifices of those who have come before us.” ~ Emmons

27. “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” ~ G.K. Chesterton

28. “I find that the more willing I am to be grateful for the small things in life, the bigger stuff just seems to show up from unexpected sources, and I am constantly looking forward to each day with all the surprises that keep coming my way!” ~ Louise L. Hay

29. “Make it a habit to tell people thank you. To express your appreciation, sincerely and without the expectation of anything in return. Truly appreciate those around you, and you’ll soon find many others around you. Truly appreciate life, and you’ll find that you have more of it.” ~ Ralph Marston

30. “Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don’t unravel.” ~ Author Unknown

31. “Get down on your knees and thank God you’re still on your feet.”?~ Unknown

32. “[The most fortunate are those who] have a wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder, and even ecstasy.” – Abraham Maslow

33. An Irish Blessing:

“Count your blessings instead of your crosses;

Count your gains instead of your losses.

Count your joys instead of your woes;

Count your friends instead of your foes.

Count your smiles instead of your tears;

Count your courage instead of your fears.

Count your full years instead of your lean;

Count your kind deeds instead of your mean.

Count your health instead of your wealth;

Love your neighbor as much as yourself.”

34. “God smiles when we praise and thank Him continually. Few things feel better than receiving heartfelt praise and appreciation from someone else. God loves it, too. An amazing thing happens when we offer praise and thanksgiving to God. When we give God enjoyment, our own hearts are filled with joy.”?~ William Law

35. “Begin with thanking Him for some little thing, and then go on, day by day, adding to your subjects of praise; thus you will find their numbers grow wonderfully; and, in the same proportion, will your subjects of murmuring and complaining diminish, until you see in everything some cause for thanksgiving. If you cannot begin with anything positive, begin with something negative. If your whole lot seems only filled with causes for discontent, at any rate there is some trial that has not been appointed you; and you may thank God for its being withheld from you. It is certain that the more you try to praise, the more you will see how your path and your lying down are beset with mercies, and that the God of love is ever watching to do you good.” ~ Priscilla Maurice

36. “Cultivate a thankful spirit! It will be to thee a perpetual feast. There is, or ought to be, with us no such thing as small mercies; all are great, because the least are undeserved. Indeed, a really thankful heart will extract motive for gratitude from everything, making the most even of scanty blessings.” [John Ross Macduff, The Words and Mind of Jesus, p.25].

37. “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” ~ William Arthur Ward

38. “When our perils are past, shall our gratitude sleep?” ~ George Canning

39. “A basic law: the more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale

40. “Gratitude is heaven itself.” ~ William Blake

Thanksgiving Facts

• The first Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621 over a three-day harvest festival. It included 50 Pilgrims, 90 Wampanoag Indians, and lasted three days. It is believed by historians that only five women were present.
• Turkey wasn’t on the menu at the first Thanksgiving. Venison, duck, goose, oysters, lobster, eel, and fish were likely served, alongside pumpkins and cranberries (but not pumpkin pie or cranberry sauce!).
• Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday on October 3, 1863. Sarah Josepha Hale, the woman who wrote “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” convinced Lincoln to make Thanksgiving a national holiday after writing letters for 17 years.
• The history of U.S. presidents pardoning turkeys is patchy. Harry Truman is often credited with being the first president to pardon a turkey, but that’s not quite true. He was the first to receive a ceremonial turkey from the National Turkey Federation – and he had it for dinner. John F. Kennedy was the first to let a Thanksgiving turkey go, followed by Richard Nixon who sent his turkey to a petting zoo. George H.W. Bush is the president who formalized the turkey pardoning tradition in 1989.
• There are four towns in the United States named “Turkey.” They can be found in Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, and North Carolina.
• The average number of calories consumed on Thanksgiving is 4,500.
• Butterball answers more than 100,000 turkey-cooking questions via their Butterball Turkey Hotline each November and December.
• The tradition of football on Thanksgiving began in 1876 with a game between Yale and Princeton. The first NFL games were played on Thanksgiving in 1920.
• More than 54 million Americans are expected to travel during the Thanksgiving holiday this year.

Happy Thanksgiving

It's easy to forget that we have free choice and free speech while most of the world does not. Americans have overcome more struggle than any nation in the world and today is a day for unity.

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