Thanksgiving Day

2. Thanksgiving day
• Thanksgiving Day is on the fourth Thursday of
November. It is a time to give thanks for the
harvest of the preceding year. Today,
Thanksgiving means spending time with family
and friends over a large feast. Thanksgiving Day
has been celebrated in the United States since
1863.

3. Celebration
• Thanksgiving Day centers around family and friends where
a meal is shared. The meal traditionally includes turkey,
stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce,
rolls, gravy, and pumpkin pie. It's a time to reflect and give
thanks for what they have. Parades and festivities are held in
some cities, portraying Thanksgiving and marking the start
of the Christmas season. Most government and businesses
are closed. Many people have the Friday after Thanksgiving
off giving them a four day weekend which is popular to see
family and friends out of town.

4. History
• The traditional Thanksgiving holiday is traced to a
sparsely documented celebration in 1621 at Plymouth
which is in present-day Massachusetts. The feast was
prompted by a good harvest. But the very first
Thanksgiving was actually in 1623, giving thanks for the
rain that ended a drought. The holiday spread to various
dates in different communities and even more than once
a year. The first national Thanksgiving Day was
proclaimed by George Washington, the first president of
the United States, on November 26, 1789.

5. Macy’s Parade
• In the 1920s one of New York’s most famous departement
stores began a parade through the streets of the city to
celebrate Thanksgiving. Employees of Macy’s wore
fantastic costumes taking lions and tigers through the
streets. Now the parade is famous for its fifteen enormous
ballons depicting fovourite children’s characters such as
Kermit the Frog or Snoopy, Toothless the Dragon or
Paddington Bear.

6. Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Slince the start of this century, the day after Thanksgiving
has marked the starts of Christmas shopping with stores
reducing their prices sometimes by over 50%. Many people
have the day off work, shops open early (sometimes even at
midnight!) and people often queue for hours to get the best
bargains. Cyber Monday, the following Monday, is the day
for online bergains. These popular sales now happen in
many countries across the world. They’ve even travalled
across the Atlantic to the UK and other European countries.
Billions of dollars are spent on Black Friday and Cyber
Monday.