What do you know about the history of Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is a day for a grand feast that everyone can enjoy. Do you know the main historical events that happened during the first Thanksgiving?

The original Thanksgiving took place when 102 pilgrims took a perilous journey to escape religious persecution. They fled from their own country to search for new land to freely practice their Christian faith.

In September of 1620, the pilgrims boarded a small ship called the Mayflower. The Mayflower left Plymouth, England, seeking a new home.

Many travelers on the ship felt seasick from the ongoing, sometimes terrifying, storms that constantly occurred. These extreme conditions caused one man known as the Stranger to drown.

When they landed 66 days later, they had to endure a hard winter, which killed 46 people. After winter, the first Thanksgiving was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their harvest in 1621.  The remaining 55 people and 91 Wampanoag indians celebrated a plentiful feast, which lasted for three days.

The Pilgrims ate a variety of foods, including lobster, seal, swan, boiled pumpkin, fried bread, fish, berries, watercress, dried fruit, venison, plums, clams, and corn. Turkey was not on the menu. Neither was pumpkin pie or mashed potatoes.

Abraham Lincoln declared the first Thanksgiving on November 26, 1863. This holiday was made in celebration of a victory at Gettysburg, for the Union Army.

I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning 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 interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.
Now Thanksgiving is a widely-celebrated holiday that comes with the tradition of eating mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, casseroles, ham, cornbread, pork roast, squash soup, glazed carrots, pomegranate brisket, short ribs, and (of course) turkey with stuffing.