The community of St. Paul’s join all the nation in Thanksgiving for the families, friends, communities, and this nation that we have been given. Thanksgiving Day, a holy day in the calendar of the Book of Common Prayer (pp. 17, 33), that coincides with the first observance of Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday by the United States in 1789. Before, there was a custom, observed in the Plymouth colony since 1621, of setting aside three days for prayer at the time. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln instituted celebrating Thanksgiving Day each year on the last Thursday of November.
There is a universal quality to Thanksgiving that is not shared among all church holidays, for it is a day of prayer as well as a secular day of celebration among all us Americans. Indeed, among all people, for it is our harvest festival. Every tradition thanks God for the fruits of the earth and the labor of those who tend and gather them.