Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving Day in America is a time to offer thanks, of family gatherings and holiday meals. A time of turkeys, and pumpkin pie(南瓜饼). A time for Indian corn, holiday parades（游行） and giant balloons.

What date is thanksgiving Day in USA? What kind of special food do people eat on Thanksgiving Day?

Here are some pictures which show how people celebrate Thanksgiving Day

The First Thanksgiving by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris

We are good friends!

Parades and balloons

Thanksgiving Day is a very special day for people in USA. They celebrate it on the last Thursday in Nov. Canadians also celebrate Thanksgiving Day, but they do it on the second Monday of Oct. In Britain, where this festival is called “ Harvest Festival ”, people celebrate earlier in the year, in Sept.

The first thanksgiving service in North America took place on 4 Dec when 38 English people arrived in America to make their home in the new country. They held this service not to thank God for the harvest, but for their safe journey. The next year, they had a bad winter, but fortunately, with the help of the local Indians, they survived the difficulty. So they decided to celebrate with a big meal, inviting abut 90 Indians to their meal to thank for their help.

Thanksgiving Day celebration was held every year for a long time, but not always on the same day of the year. Then, in 1789, President George Washington named 26 Dec. as the Day of Thanksgiving. Almost a hundred years later, President Abraham Lincoln changed the date, and said the last Thursday in Nov. should be Thanksgiving Day.

The End

President Bush pets the national Thanksgiving turkey Marshmallow during a ceremony pardoning the turkey in the Old Executive Office Building, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2005.

Chinese little emperors now learn to say 'thanks' Thanksgiving isn't a Chinese tradition, but many people think it's high time that privileged one-child "little emperors" give thanks to their parents for their sacrifices. One technical school in the northern Hebei Province is reminding students to "cherish your parents, work hard and repay their love."

Hundreds of students responded to the call by signing their names on a poster. One signer said his name would express his filial piety. Prior to the Western Thanksgiving Day, which fell yesterday, education authorities in the provincial capital Shijiazhuang launched a "thanksgiving" campaign among nearly 100,000 students from 60 schools and universities.

The students, all born between the middle and late 1980s and mostly only children, were told to figure out how much their parents have paid for their education and compare the costs with their families' annual income.

They were urged to write their parents a letter of thanks, prepare a public speech on the topic and take concrete actions to show their gratitude, said Li Gang, a publicity official with the Shijiazhuang municipal government. "The youngsters must learn to be grateful," said Wang Dongmei, an official in charge of students' affairs at Shijiazhuang Technical School. Wang's school has 12,100 students, but a recent survey shows nearly a half of them never write to their parents.

Forty-one percent of the students said they wrote once, but admitted it was actually an assignment rather than a voluntary expression. Ironically though, many parents were rather worried by the unexpected thanksgiving letters and began to wonder what was wrong with their children. "Some even took half a day's train ride just to make sure their children were okay," said a school official. "It is a surprise indeed because very few people still post those 'snail mails."'