Join the Calumet College of St. Joseph family as we celebrate Thanksgiving Dinner on November the 27^th.

Every year on the fourth Thursday of November, America celebrates Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was first celebrated not in the United States of America but in Colonial Plymouth, Massachusetts.

In 1620, the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth and started a colony. It wasn’t long after landing that the Pilgrims ran into a huge problem – not enough supplies. Seventeenth century America was a world without corner stores, take-out Chinese, and delivery pizza. Because of the distance between England and its colonies, it took months to get supplies from one place to another. So, if you wanted to eat, you had to grow, catch, or hunt for it. But herein lies the Pilgrims’ problem – they didn’t know what to grow, how to catch, or how or even what to hunt.

During that rough first year, the Pilgrims were headed for disaster. Luckily, Native Americans were not the blood thirsty savages they were made-out to be. Massasoit, the leader of the Wampanoag tribe, donated food to the Pilgrims so that they would be able to survive the winter. Later on, Squanto taught the Pilgrims to grow, hunt, and fish.

Then in 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest in the New World. To show thanks to the helpful Natives, they decided to have a Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving was not a new concept at the time; however, it was commonly used to celebrate the end of a war. For three days during the harvest season of November, the Natives and Pilgrims shared food and enjoyed one another’s company.

In 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared a national day of thanksgiving on the 26^th of November. Lincoln’s successor followed his lead by declaring the final Thursday in November an annual holiday. However, in 1939 Franklin Roosevelt broke the tradition because there were five Thursdays in November that year, and he proclaimed Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday of November.

At 5pm on November 27^th come and join Calumet College of St. Joseph for Thanksgiving dinner so we can all give thanks for, in the words of George Washington when proclaiming a Thanksgiving in 1789, “the many signal favors of Almighty God.”