Happy Thanksgiving!

Many of you will be well aware that today, Thursday 22nd November 2012 is the Thanksgiving holiday in the USA.

It is acknowledged that the first Thanksgiving celebration was in 1621, when the Plymouth  (Massachusetts) colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast. For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. 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.

So most of us know that Thanksgiving is officially celebrated in USA and Canada (earlier in the year), but did you know that there is a 3rd country in the list? That country is Brazil - although most Brazilians don't know it! It was declared a holiday in 1949, but only a couple of cities in Brazil have public holidays. Actually many websites I checked stated that there are thanksgiving holidays in Argentina, Japan, Korea, Liberia and Switzerland and other countries. The relationship of these holidays to the traditional USA one varies. It's quite a strange combination of countries!

Here in São Paulo state there is no public holiday, but we celebrated with a Thanksgiving meal back on  Saturday 10th November. It was a charity event organised by a couple of the ministries at the church we attend here (PIB), so we all pitched in helping out with the preparations. It was a delicious meal, with the normal dishes - turkey, mashed potato, sweet potato crunch, gravy and so on. Particularly delicious was the Pumpkin Pie for desert …