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A national civic holiday rather than a religious one, it was held to celebrate the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from an illness. The first Thanksgiving after Confederation was observed on 5 April 1872. As historian Peter Stevens has noted, some citizens “objected to this government request, saying it blurred the distinction between church and state that was so important to many Canadians.” In Canada, the holiday was intended for the “public and solemn” recognition of God’s mercies. It was organized at the behest of leaders of the Protestant clergy, who appropriated the holiday of American Thanksgiving, which was first observed in 1777 and established as a national day of “public thanksgiving and prayer” in 1789. The first national Thanksgiving in Canada was celebrated in the Province of Canada in 1859. When and why has Thanksgiving been observed in Canada? The citizens of Halifax commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 with a day of Thanksgiving, and Loyalists subsequently brought the celebration to other parts of the country. The prototypical Thanksgiving feast featuring the uniquely North American turkey, squash and pumpkin was introduced to Nova Scotia in the 1750s. This was 17 years before what is often recognized as the first American Thanksgiving - the Pilgrims’ celebration of their first harvest in Massachusetts in 1621 (which was actually predated by several similar events in the New England colonies by at least 14 years). Having attended the festivities, Marc Lescarbot remarked that they consisted of “a feast, a discharge of musketry, and as much noise as could be made by some fifty men, joined by a few Indians, whose families served as spectators.” The first feast was held on 14 November 1606 to celebrate the return of Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt from an expedition. Local Mi'kmaq families were also invited.
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#Pilgrims first thanksgiving series
Croix in the winter of 1604–05, Samuel de Champlain founded a series of rotating feasts at Port Royal called the Ordre de Bon Temps (“Order of Good Cheer”). In 1606, in an attempt to prevent the kind of scurvy epidemic that had decimated the settlement at Île Ste. They celebrated Communion and formally expressed their thanks through the ship’s Chaplain, Robert Wolfall, who, according to explorer Richard Collinson, “made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankefull to God for theyr strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places. They ate a meal of salt beef, biscuits and mushy peas to celebrate and give thanks for their safe arrival in what is now Nunavut. The first Thanksgiving by Europeans in North America was held by Sir Martin Frobisher and his crew in the Eastern Arctic in 1578. The Smithsonian Institute has noted that some First Nations “sought to insure a good harvest with dances and rituals.” The European settlers brought with them a similar tradition of harvest celebrations (for which the symbol was the cornucopia, or horn of plenty), which dates back to European peasant societies. Indigenous peoples in North America have a history of holding communal feasts in celebration of the fall harvest that predates the arrival of European settlers. (courtesy Vlad Litvinov) Origins and history of Thanksgiving in Canada