What gives with Thanksgiving?/Lockhart's age

[foxmoth at qnet.com]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., blpurdom at y... wrote:

>
> 
> North American Thanksgiving celebrations as we know them 
aren't all 
> that old (I think it was Lincoln who fixed the U.S. version at the 
> last Thursday in November), but they are just continuations of 
this 
> ancient practice, with overtones of being thankful for things 
other 
> than the harvest now that we don't live in a primarily agrarian 
> society.  Read "The Golden Bough," which has numerous 
descriptions of 
> these types of celebrations around the world.  Aren't there any 
> harvest celebrations at the appropriate time in Australia/New 
Zealand?

  
    In other European-derived cultures, Christmas fulfilled the 
social and family functions that Thanksgiving Day assumed.  
The Pilgrims did not celebrate Christmas, since they could find 
no authority for doing so in the New Testament. Thus the custom 
grew up in New England of a November festival. It was a way to 
take stock of the harvest and find out if Grandma needed help to 
prepare for winter.
 A movement began in the nineteenth century to make it a 
national holiday. It was thought that public life was becoming 
increasingly coarse, masculine and secular, and that the home 
should become a center of the refined, the feminine and the 
spiritual. It was part of the same movement that brought us 
women's magazines and Mother's Day.
Franklin D. Roosevelt  fixed the holiday on the fourth Thursday in 
November, after some experimentation, though Lincoln did 
declare a November Thanksgiving Day.  
Pippin