posted November 29, 2008 01:54 PM            

If it were one person I could easily write it off to a specific character. But the fact of the matter remains it most certainly was not.

Another genius wrote :

Happy Thankstaking! Yes, I have again come out to stomp on another one of your beloved holidays!

(followed by a giant tirade) to which even more people replied:

"The US govt & military definitely needs to be called out more for the genocide they instigate all over. Thanks for sharing."

"Thanks for sharing your notes and I completely agree with you 100%. I actually don't celebrate Thanksgiving"

"i have been secretly mourning today, because i am visiting my family and there is no way to go about avoiding this holiday with them. but, yeah. !"

Now what was done to Native Americans is horrendous and should never be forgotten. It was the money grabbing colonialists who destroyed and plundered an amazing culture...Though I don't think it was the first pilgrims, in fact I believe they actually got along just fine...It was the later people who came to land grab...But thats a side note. While i strongly believe in commemorating this horrible ill, i will never understand why anyone would choose to be nasty on a day of giving Thanks...The worst part of all that is I KNOW for a FACT that the person who wrote that is a rich brat who will be the FIRST in line on Black Friday, fighting a grandmother for a sweater...

Just ONE person with common sense responded with :

"Thanksgiving was first proposed by George Washington as a day to reflect and give thanks to God for our blessings, and to celebrate the ratification of the U.S. Constitution."

The person proceeded to explain to this psychotic being that in fact Thanksgiving it itself is not evil and finding something wrong with it JUST because it is American is what is actually a true evil. To which this person was met with :

"SHUT UP YOU STUPID WHITE "

So pardon me if I sound a little angry...but why are those people here???

posted November 29, 2008 05:19 PM            

BUT.. I don't blame the present population or those before them. It happens, it was horrible but every race has been oppressed and every race has been the oppressors.

This Smallpox day I was here in Germany (my mother's homeland). I took my husband on post, so that he could go back for his second deployment, to fight a war that has gone on for years, years before WE ever had 9-11.

Two days before I sent him downrange, I attended a Memorial for the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Division. I work for one of their squadrons. I paid tribute to more than 60 people killed in less than 3 years.. For people we do not know, for a land we do not live in but for a purpose that makes it right.

I do have some conflicting feelings, not because Bear the Leo is down there, but because it seems that we do too much to help everyone else out, yet we get nothing in return.

posted November 29, 2008 06:42 PM            

================ http://rosettasister.wordpress.com/2008/11/27/a-thanksgivi ng-story-%E2%80%93-abraham-lincoln-and-sarah-josepha-hale/

A Thanksgiving Story – Abraham Lincoln and Sarah Josepha Hale

To Sarah Josepha Hale Thanksgiving would be a therapeutic. holiday. “There is a deep moral influence in these periodical seasons of rejoicing, in which whole communities participate. They bring out . . . the best sympathies in our natures

Hale saw this spiritual dimension of Thanksgiving as a means for preventing the insanity of civil war in America. This is why, as hostilities heated up between North and South, she bombarded both national and state officials with requests for the national holiday.

By 1863 when Lincoln issued his now famous Thanksgiving Proclamation, Sarah Hale had penned literally thousands of these letters in her own hand. “If every state would join in Union Thanksgiving on the 24th of this month, would it not be a renewed pledge of love and loyalty to the Constitution of the United States?” Hale wrote in a 1859 editorial.

Of course, Sarah Hale was unable to avert those saddest years of American history, but in 1863, as civil war ravished the land, Abraham Lincoln did issue the proclamation Hale had spent nearly 40 years and thousands of letters to procure.

Abraham Lincoln on October 3, 1863 issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation, for the first time setting aside the last Thursday in November as a National Day for giving thanks.

The text of this Proclamation is below.

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God.In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign states to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere, except in the theater of military conflict, while that theater has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle, or the ship; the ax has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well as the iron and coal as of our precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege, and the battlefield, and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.

No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the imposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purpose, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union. In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the city of Washington, this 3d day of October, A.D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-eighth.

posted November 30, 2008 05:56 AM            

My mother (of Mexican descent) has always celebrated Thanksgiving as a simple holiday for giving Thanks to whatever you believe in. It could be the Christian God or anything else but just gratitude for all you do have. And yes, grumbles and rumbles are felt about Columbus Day.

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AceNeerav

Thanksgiving is simply a day set aside to give thanks to [your God/dess, or whatever suits your belief system] with friends and family. Traditionally although not always accurately, foods prepared are supposed to coincide with the original "thanksgiving meal" participated in by the first English settlers "pilgrims" and the native tribespeople who helped them survive. The holiday does have Christian overtones but there's no law requiring that you celebrate the day in a Christian way.

Halloween has its roots in an old European pagan holiday, Samhain, when it was believed that the "veil between the worlds" was thinnest. That is, it was the night of the year when communicating with those who have passed on and other beings in whatever other realms you believed in was easiest. Many traditions involved some sort of remembrance of ancestors. Eventually, as the holiday became more and more Christianised, the idea that "bad spirits" and beings also roamed the earth that night took greater hold and so precautions were taken ... ie, dressing up in frightful costumes to scare away the boogies, using jacko'lanterns to scare away Jack (who comes looking for souls with his own mini jacko'lantern), etc. It also conveniently coincides closely with All Souls' Day and All Saints Day, Christian (Catholic?) holidays for remembering and honoring deceased ancestors and saints. Eventually, the holiday became almost entirely secularized and the traditions became more of a night of mischief and fun.