Dr. L. John Van Til,FloydReports.com
How will you spend your Thanksgiving Day this year? Sleep in because you have extra days off? Settle down to watch football? Pull up a chair at four o’clock to eat a huge feast? Make plans for Black Friday,plotting with the multitudes to storm the stores and “shop-until-you-drop?”
Why not consider another tradition? The tradition of the Pilgrims,honored nationally since the days of George Washington.
President Washington established the first national day of thanksgiving in 1789 with a proclamation. Lincoln added gravitas to the tradition with his proclamation of 1863. Both presidents invited Americans to give thanks to “Almighty God” for the blessings bestowed on the nation. Lincoln noted that God blessed America even though He was “dealing with us in anger for our sins.”
In 2009 and 2010,President Obama’s proclamations included quotations from Washington and Lincoln about God’s place in our Thanksgiving Day celebrations. In both his proclamations,Obama commented on the natives who helped the Pilgrims. They surely did help in an important way,but it was the Pilgrims who proclaimed it a day of thanksgiving to God for his blessings. It was not the natives who invited the Pilgrims to dinner and proclaimed a Thanksgiving Day in 1623.
That aside,consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dramatic move regarding Thanksgiving:In 1939 and 1940,FDR changed the date of celebration from the last Thursday in November—as it had been since Washington—to the fourth Thursday in November,allowing another week for shopping before Christmas. An uproar followed. Half of the states literally refused to follow FDR’s proclamation.
Congress put an end to the matter on….