Thanksgiving

 

Different countries have different national days that feed their way into incorporation into Scouting so today I'm looking at Thanksgiving which is marked in October in Canada and more famously the United States of America today.

Thanksgiving is a national holiday celebrated on various dates in the United States, Canada, Grenada, Saint Lucia, and Liberia.

It began as a day of giving thanks for the blessings of the harvest and of the preceding year. Similarly named festival holidays occur in Germany and Japan. 

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States and around the same part of the year in other places. 

Scouts may assist at home or in community settings in "making" thanksgiving, preparing the food or setting the dining area.

Here Scouts have thanksgiving together as a unit which I'm sure would be most memorable for all.

Why we in Great Britain don't do thanksgiving is probably lost in time because we do have Harvest Festivals in our Churches and Chapels in October which schools traditionally collected non-perishable foods for relief to the old and less well off.

It might be a tradition well worth importing.