E. B. 2,3 MonteLongo School

Teacher: Carla Soares

work done by:

Gonçalo Gonçalves Number 5 9thC

Introduction

With this work I hope you´ll learn how Thanksgiving started and how it is celebrated. I hope you´ll enjoy this work and learn something with it.

The first thanksgiving

A long time ago in a country called England, there were a group of people who all went to the same church, they were called Puritans.

There was a king of England who thought everyone should go to his church.

He got mad when the pilgrims didn’t want to go to his church, he said, “You go to my church or you go to jail!”

The pilgrims said, “Ok, we’ll go to jail.”

Finally the king realized that the Pilgrims weren’t going to change their minds so he said, “You can get out of jail, but you have to leave England.”

So the pilgrims set sail for America on a ship called the “Mayflower.”

The trip to America was long and hard. There were storms and the ship was really crowded.

When they got to America, it was winter and there were no food or houses. Many of the pilgrims died from sickness, starvation and freezing to death.

There were some people who lived in America already. We called them Indians. They saw the Pilgrims suffering and they decided to help them.

They showed them how to hunt and fish.

They helped them build houses out of the trees there.

They showed them how to grow corn and pumpkins.

When it was winter again, the Pilgrims had food and a place to live.

They were so happy, they said, “We need to have a feast and celebrate. We’ll invite our friends, the Indians.”

So they had a great feast that lasted for a whole week, they ate turkey, fish, deer, sweet potatoes, corn and pumpkin. They played games.

But the first thing they did was to say a prayer of Thanksgiving to God for giving them friends, food, houses and a place to live where they could go to any church they wanted.

Thanksgiving Day is a holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada. Thanksgiving is celebrated each year on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States. Thanksgiving in Canada falls on the same day as Columbus Day in the United States. Because of the longstanding traditions of the holiday, the celebration often extends to the weekend that falls closest to the day it is celebrated.

In the United States, certain kinds of food are traditionally served at Thanksgiving meals. Firstly, baked or roasted turkey is usually the featured item on any Thanksgiving feast table (so much so that Thanksgiving is sometimes referred to as "Turkey Day"). Stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, sweet corn, various fall vegetables (mainly various kinds of squashes), and pumpkin pie are commonly associated with Thanksgiving dinner. All of these are actually native to the Americas or were introduced as a new food source to the Europeans when they arrived. Turkey may be an exception.

We still have Thanksgiving today.

Bibliography and Netography

Wikipédia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving) - InternetCranberry Thanksgiving - book

Conclusion

With this work I learned many things about "Thanksgiving".I hope that you all have learned a lot, too.