Satan has a stronghold on Thanksgiving. Have you noticed?
In our neighborhood, people started decorating for Christmas as soon as they
took their Halloween decorations down. A few homes even had their wreaths
up before October 31st! I have to admit the decorations are beautiful. The
colors themselves bring joy and excitement just seeing them.
Retail merchants rarely even acknowledge Thanksgiving like they did when I
was a child. They skip right by Thanksgiving and go straight from Halloween
to Christmas. In fact, most of them don’t even close on Thanksgiving
Thursday. This denies their own employees the opportunity to pause and
reflect on the blessings of life. There’s simply too much money to be made
on Christmas for them to stop and acknowledge Thanksgiving.
History tells us that Thanksgiving has always struggled to enjoy a place of
prominence in our lives. No wonder! The last thing satan wants is for
Christians to be free of the distractions of everyday living long enough to
think about how good God’s been to them.
We can’t even agree on when we celebrated our first Thanksgiving. Most of us
were taught in school that the Pilgrims first celebrated Thanksgiving in
1621 in Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts.
Originally, 102 of them sailed here from England on the Mayflower. Sadly,
only 56 of them survived their first year. They realized when their first
harvest was so bountiful that they could not have made it without their
Indian friends. So, they decided to celebrate with a feast.
The problem was it lasted for three days and resembled a traditional English
harvest festival more than a true “thanksgiving”. These early Americans
were grateful just to be alive.
Today, many historians argue that the first Thanksgiving Day was not
celebrated in 1621. They believe it actually happened two years later in
1623.
Massachusetts was experiencing a severe drought, prompting Governor William
Bradford to plea for the Pilgrims to pray. They did! It rained the very
next day which insured another good harvest. An appreciative Bradford
immediately ordered a day of thanksgiving.
Strangely enough, Thanksgiving was not celebrated again until 53 years
later! George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving in 1789.
However, the celebration had its share of detractors. Many did not believe
that a national day of thanksgiving should be set aside just because of the
hardships of a few Pilgrims.
Actually it was a woman had more to do with our country’s decision to
celebrate what we recognize today as Thanksgiving. But it wasn’t George
Washington she had to convince. It was actually 74 years and 15 presidents
later that she convinced Abraham Lincoln in 1863 to declare a day of
Thanksgiving. Even then, it took Sara Josepha Hale – a magazine editor –
forty years to write enough letters and editorials to convince a sitting
American President to set aside the last Thursday in November as
Thanksgiving Day.
Every American President since Lincoln has signed proclamations
commemorating Thanksgiving. Interestingly, the holiday had been celebrated
on the fourth Thursday of November every year since 1941. But President
Franklin Roosevelt agreed to move the day from the last Thursday in the
month of November to the next-to-last Thursday. Guess why? You got it: To
create a longer Christmas shopping season! If the devil’s not in the
details, I don’t know who is!
So while Thanksgiving as a holiday has struggled to get where it is today,
don’t let thanksgiving be just a state of mind struggle for any prominence
in your life.
It’s more than a season. It’s an attitude.
I am grateful for life, family, good health, and friends. They are much
more important that all of the material things that have come my way. Time
has taught me that if I lost everything tomorrow, I would still have all of
them.
So this Thanksgiving, take a moment and thank God for things that no one can
take from you. After all is said and done, it really is Him to whom we
should pause and give thanks!
Copyright 2024, Pen Holder Ministries, Inc.
Share on Facebook