A lot of cultures around the world often celebrated the harvest season with feasts to offer thanks to higher powers for their sustenance and survival.
In 1541 Spaniard Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his troops celebrated a "Thanksgiving" while searching for New World gold in what is now the Texas Panhandle.
Later such feasts were held by French Huguenot colonists in present-day Jacksonville, Florida (1564), In 1607, English colonists and Abnaki Indians at Maine's Kennebec River, and in 1610, Jamestown, Virginia (when the arrival of a food-laden ship ended a brutal famine.
In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. It wasn't until 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November.
Everything we know about the three-day Plimoth gathering comes from a description in a letter wrote by Edward Winslow, leader of the Plimoth Colony, in 1621, Monac said that feast was not something that was supposed to be repeated again and again. It wasn't even a Thanksgiving, which in the 17th century was a day of fasting. It was a harvest celebration."The letter had been lost and for more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states.
When, in 1841 Boston publisher Alexander Young printed Winslow's brief account of the feast and added his own twist, dubbing it the "First Thanksgiving."
President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving Day a national holiday in 1863. In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt established the current date for observance, the fourth Thursday of November.
The truth is the first "real" Thanksgiving happened two centuries later from when happened.
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