As the end of each calendar year approaches, one reflects on the end of the current cycle and looks forward to the beginning of a new cycle. Thus, as November arrives and with it often cooler temperatures and shorter days, one starts getting ready for the arrival of winter and the end of the calendar year. Not by chance, it is a period in which several monotheistic religions are involved in the celebration of festivities that, regardless of the different role they play within that religion and in the world, mark the beginning of a new liturgical cycle. Therefore, religions such as Judaism with Chanukah (Festival of Lights), Christianity with Christmas (Birth of Christ), Islam with Milad un Nabi (The Prophet's Birthday), all celebrate main festivities in December. It is worthwhile to add to these holidays another more recently adopted festivity that has a somewhat secular meaning: Kwanza. This sequence of festivities is preceded and anticipated by Thanksgiving in the United States.
There are celebrations of Thanksgiving elsewhere. There are similar festivities in Germany and England, connected to harvest festivals, but also in the following countries: The Netherlands, Liberia, Norfolk Island in Australia, the Philippines and even Japan. Needless to say, the most popular Thanksgiving holidays are the one in Canada and the other in the United States. The one in Canada is celebrated on the second Monday of October, whereas the one in the United States is celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, that is, very close to the aforementioned religious holidays. In these two North-American countries, Thanksgiving has acquired a secular and lay meaning. However, the tradition of a celebration such as Thanksgiving, although with different names, has been present in several cultures around the world for centuries, because the desire to give thanks is so powerful. The holiday as celebrated in Canada and the United States find its roots in the years of the English Reformation in the second half of the XVI century. Therefore, it is traditionally understood that in Canada the first Thanksgiving was in 1578, whereas Thanksgiving in the territory that would become the United States was first celebrated in Plymouth, in Massachusetts, in 1621. As several immigrant communities started settling in North America, they all added a taste of their traditions to the holiday that started being called Thanksgiving. However, in these first occurrences of Thanksgiving, the festivity was an occasional one, that is, religious leaders and sometimes even royal governors called for a period of Thanksgiving in order to give thanks for different motives, which ranged from agricultural reasons to social and political events. George Washington, when he was President of the United States, called for the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration in that country: it was November 26, 1789. Many decades later, after a 40-year campaign of awareness by the writer Sarah Josepha Hale, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving to be a national holiday celebrated in all the states. In current times, Thanksgiving has acquired a definitely secular meaning: in 1957 the Canadian Parliament proclaimed that Thanksgiving be celebrated on the second Monday of October (in 1971 with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act the United States ensured the coincidence of Columbus Day with the Canadian Thanksgiving). On December 26, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a Congressional resolution that moved the day of Thanksgiving from the last to the fourth Thursday in November. It is intriguing to consider that three years earlier, in 1938, the US President's reasoning for proposing such a change had been his conviction that the earlier celebration of the holiday would provide an economic boost to the upcoming festivities and year.
Although the reason for fixing the day of Thanksgiving in the United States does not seem to address the other religious holidays that follow during the month of December, one cannot help but consider that indeed that holiday officially opens a month of religious celebrations important in the three monotheistic religions as well as a celebration important for the African-American community. On the one hand, given the heavily commercial emphasis put on these holidays, there seems to be the desire to boost the economy, as President Roosevelt reasoned; on the other, in that period there is also the idealistic desire to unite the country before each community gathers around its own religious festivity. In other words, Thanksgiving becomes the holiday in which citizens celebrate the country in which they live. After all, if the origin of Thanksgiving is traditionally related to the turkey dinner that the indigenous peoples shared with the Pilgrims, then Thanksgiving implicitly marks, at least since World War II, the celebration of the religion of the State.
It is interesting that every four years (and 2016 is one of those years) November is the month that not only ends with the celebration of Thanksgiving, but it also opens with Election Day. Since 1845 it was established that the Tuesday following the first Monday of November would be Election Day: in this way, the event did not interfere with the needs of an agrarian society such as the one of the United States at the time, nor with the obligations of the market, nor with those of the Biblical Sabbath (Saturday and Sunday). The month of November, then, opens with a fundamental ritual, Election Day, and concludes with Thanksgiving as the holiday celebrating, on the one hand, the historical survival of the Pilgrims and the generosity of the First Peoples and the Native Americans who shared the turkey dinner with them, and on the other, the gathering of families around a table for the consummation of the meal that, by no chance, commemorates the coming together of natives and migrants.
Election Day may conclude a political process that is strenuous for the people of the country, that turns out to be divisive and, in that respect, dangerous for the cohesion of the country itself. Thanksgiving is the opportunity for all US citizens to recognize themselves in the celebration of a history that today, generations after that first dinner, sees new peoples claiming the status of natives while facing the arrival of other migrants, often forced to leave their homeland because of political intolerance or cultural divisiveness or social inequality. Thanksgiving, then, may be just the right time to give thanks: for what one is and has, for the personal and collective history of families and the country itself. The year is about to end, the history of the country's past requires a liturgical gesture of celebration. After that, each family transitions to the celebrations of their specific religious or cultural holiday, whether it is Chanukah or Christmas or Milad un Nabi or even a holiday rooted in ethnic awareness such as Kwanza. Some families may only wish to participate in the consumerism attached to some of these religious holidays.
Thanksgiving opens the season of giving thanks. Regardless of religious denomination (or lack thereof), political engagement or ethnic identity, giving thanks is a gesture of openness towards the other. Hopefully, the other does not only have the familiar semblance of relatives and friends gathering around a table, but also and especially the semblance of the less fortunate: the strangers, the homeless, the migrants, and the refugees. It is in that gesture of openness that the hope for the future and for the strength of the community resides.