European Thanksgiving?

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Well, Thanksgiving is next Thrusday here in the U.S. I have a question for the non-USers here on SP. Is there some type of somewhat equivalent European holiday to Thanksgiving? I've been thinking that Thanksigiving is one of few exclusively north american holidays (I think Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving too, even if it's not on the same day). While it's probably common knowledge, if you don't know, Thanksgiving is a day for giving thanks and essentially celebrates the first successful European colony in the new world. (The whole pilgrim/puritan thing.)

Which is why I don't think there's a European equivalent, and it's really the only one I can think of. Most holidays are either religious in nature (and are thereby celebrated by everyone who practices that religion regardless of where they happen to be living at the time) or social in nature, such as an Independence Day, Veterans Day, or Presidents Day. While the social holidays vary by date and place to place, I'm quite confident there are European equivalents to Independence Day, Veterans Day, and President's Day, as many countries have a date for celebrating independence, all countries probably have veterans, and while all countries don't have presidents, I'm sure there are equivalent public leaders that are held in the same regard. (Actually, Veterans Day may be the same date in Europe as it is in the U.S. - historically November 11th - when the Treaty of Versailles to end WWI was signed.)

 

We don't have anything in Britain for Thanksgiving.
Our "holiday" dates are Christmas, Boxing and New Years days, Good Friday & Easter Monday, May Day and Spring Bank (both in May, but the title of the days in reversed in Scotland for some reason), and Summer bank holiday (August) Not sure of the history of the extra bank holidays, there was some talk of having a Trafalgar day (after the battle) at some point but it may have been amalgatised with on of the May holidays. (Excuse my spelling, just come back from Friday lunch and drinkies)

 

Nov. 11 is Poland's Independence Day. There's Guy Fawkes on Nov. 5 in England. I'm not aware of any other European holidays in November.

In Poland, Something close to Thanksgiving would be Aug. 15, a holiday that translates as "Herbal Godsmother" ("Virgin Mary of the Herbs" would be something more English-style), where farmers offer thanks for good harvest.

 

Bonfire Night/Guy Fawkes isn't a holiday, neither are the Patron Saint days (George, David, Andrew), except St. Patricks in NI/ROI. NI also gets Orangemans day in July, with ROI getting one in October.

 

We have lots of holidays here in Sweden but no thanksgiving, no independence day, no veterans day (it is almost 200 years ago since Sweden was involved in anything resembling a real armed conflict) and no president day as we are a monarch but we dont have a "king" day either.

Pretty much every old Christian holiday is an official holiday here, one part of our Christian heritage secularized Sweden have not been keen on relinquishing. It is funny though how many of these Christian holidays happen to coincide with old pagan holidays.

We also have a holiday on hte first of May, which is somekind of socialistic proletarian fight the power kind of holiday.

Oh, we also get the 1st of January free, which is mostly for pragmatic reasons . I am not sure if that is a red day in most other countries?

 

We don't celebrate Guy Fawkes for obvious reasons!

We have just passed Samhain which is the day before the Scottish Haloween. I am also forgetting May Day.

Christmas was a pagan holiday that local Priests hated. They decided to change this to a Christian holiday in celebration of the birth of Jesus.

We also have VE day in celebration of the World Wars.

 

Yes Aldeth we have a holiday that we call Thanksgiving in Canada although we consider it more of a harvest festival than anything else. Canadian Thanksgiving is on the same day as Columbus Day in the U.S.

Our holidays are Christmas Day, Boxing Day (Dec 26), New Years, Good Friday, Victoria Day (~May 24), Canada Day(July 1), Civic Holiday(Aug 1), Labour Day(1st Monday in September), and Thanksgiving. Some people also get off Easter Monday and/or Remembrance Day (Nov 11).

 

What actually is 'thanks giving'? Isn't it just Christmas?

We get a few days off at Christmas, then a few bank holidays scattered around the year.

 

@Barmy - like I said, Thanksgiving is a celebration of the first successful colony in the present day U.S. It was the Pilgrims (Puritans) and they landed at Plymouth Rock, near present day Boston in Massachusettes. It is always celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November, so it's not a set date. It can be anywhere between Nov 22 - Nov 28.

What in the world is Boxing Day? Evidently it's in both England and Canada, but I've no idea what it celebrates.

EDIT: The complete list of National Holidays is:

New Year's Day (Jan 1st)
Martin Luther King Day (3rd Monday in January)
Presidents Day (2nd Monday in February)
Memorial Day (last Monday in May)
Independence Day (always July 4th)
Labor Day (first Monday in September)
Columbus Day (October 12, but celebrated on whatever Monday is closest to this date)
Veterans Day (always November 11th)
Thanksgiving (4th Thursday of November)
Christmas (always December 25th)

That's 11 altogether, although typically only banks, postal workers and other civil servants get all those days off. Most people have work on all of those days except Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, New Year's Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. So it's really only 6 of the 11 that are really honored by everyone.

EDIT2: Rally, you're right - I don't know what I was thinking there. Sorry for the brain fart.

[ November 19, 2004, 19:05: Message edited by: Aldeth the Foppish Idiot ]

 

AFI, swap "New Year's" for "Veteran's" and you've got it right, at least according to MY experience. I don't thjink I've had Veteran's Day off officially since I was in high school - if then.

 

We have the following:

New Year's holiday, January 1-2

Lights' Holiday, January 6 (It's a religious holiday, the celebration of Jesus baptism by John)

The three ierarchs holiday, January 30 (just for schools and universities and ofcourse for the people who are working there, me for example )

Independence day, March 25

Workers' day, May 1

Holy Ghost's day , June 1

Mother of God's day, August 15

2nd Independence day, October 28 (it is actually the celebration of the greek-italian war of 1940. The weird thing is that what is celebrated is actually the beginning of the war not its end)

The riot of the Polytechnic University day, November 17 (just for schools and universities and ofcourse for the people like me)

Chistmas, December 25

Also, there are the easter holiday and the holiday of the Pure Monday which is celebrated 40 days before easter and I think that from 2005 the May 9 will be the EU day.

[ November 19, 2004, 18:06: Message edited by: BOC ]

 

Thanksgiving is an evolution of European harvest festivals like Oktoberfest, in which you give thanks for the bountiful food the land and/or God has provided depending on your point of view. For Americans and Canadians there's a whole immigration-thankfulness aspect too, probably rooted in, "thank God we found something to eat so far from home". It's not surprising that it's viewed as a patriotic holiday in a country like the U.S., but that's not the primary aspect of a harvest festival elsewhere.

I attended an American school for three years and one of the other student's parents sneered at my mother when she referred to "Canadian Thanksgiving". "What?" she said, "Canadians copy that too? Thanksgiving is an *American* holiday, where we celebrate coming to the greatest country in the world. What do Canadians have to celebrate?" And my mom, with an evil grin, said, "Not being Americans."

 

Actually, Jamestown, Virginia was the first permanent English settlement in America.

Also, the Pilgrims (a small group of Puritan Separatists) didn't land at Plymouth Rock.

After leaving the Netherlands (Leiden and Amsterdam, where they had lived for 12 years because of persecution in England - they left the Netherlands because of economic and cultural reasons, as well as the possibility of war with Spain) they petitioned the King for a charter in Virginia. Before they left, the pilgrims (about fifty in all) teamed up with fifty secular settlers (called "Strangers" by the pilgrims, who called themselves "Saints"). Forced off course by nasty weather (what were they thinking, sailing the North Atlantic in September?), they finally landed in America after 65 days at sea. They actually landed at what would someday be called Provincetown, near Cape Cod (not Plymouth Rock) in November 1620.

After about a month of stealing food from Native Americans, searching for fresh water, and some near-battles with the local tribes, they finally decided to settle across the bay at Plymouth.

It was here that they met Samoset (who spoke very broken English - they met him first), Squanto (who had been in England, and could speak better English), and Massasoit (thier chieftan). The pilgims met these guys for the first time in March of 1620.

The "First Thanksgiving" actually didn't happen until a year later in 1621, after their first successful harvest. The First Thanksgiving took place on an unremembered date, sometime in the autumn of 1621, when the Pilgrims held a three-day feast to celebrate the bountiful harvest they reaped following their first winter in North America. The next Thanksgiving was not held until 1623 (following the relief of a drought), and was held irregularly after favorable events and days of fasting after unfavorable ones. That is, days of thanksgiving were declared rather than regularly celebrated. Thanksgiving was not celebrated annually, after the harvest, until the middle of the seventeenth century.

Thanksgiving changed dates a lot through subsequent centuries, and was not formally declared to be the fourth Thursday in November until Congress did it in 1941.

And I'm quite sure that that is more than any of you ever wanted to know about our good old turkey-day.

 

@ Aldeth - Boxing day is December 26th - in reality the only significance to it is that it is a second day of vacation at Christmas. In recent times, most Canadian stores have been opening on Boxing Day with large "Boxing Day Sales" in an attempt to get rid of unsold Christmas inventories so it has sort of evolved almost into "Shopping Day" here in Canada.

There is some debate as to where the name comes but the two most common answers are (a) from the churches making special distributions from the poor boxes on the day after Christmas or (b) the tradition of giving gift boxes to tradespeople or apprentices on that day as a reward for good service throughout the year.

Either way it doesn't really make any difference to what it is now, we just continue to call it that because "Day after Christmas Day, Day" would sound too silly.

 

American Thanksgiving seems to mean a lot more to Americans than Canadian Thanksgiving means to us; here, we basically give thanks for a day off.

 

It's part of our whole national mythology - since we don't really have a "mythology" of our own to claim, we tend to mythologize stuff from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a nation.

 

Well, in relation to Oktoberfest... Fasnacht, i.e. Carnival starts in most places in November or in springtime.

historically November 11th -> 11.11., the day fasnacht starts in a lot of places.

 

@Falstaff - Jamestown was the first colony, but I don't think it was the first successful colony. I think that's the one that was founded in or around 1608, and after a few years of success, the town was found abandoned with no settlers inside, and not even any bodies. While it has never been determined why the people of Jamestown went missing, since it occurred just a few years after they settled, I'm not sure if it can be called a successful colony.

 

i read somewhere that the US mythologi contains some think like.

cowboys, indians etc.

like billy the kid and that sort of things, is this tru?

 

@ Balle - sort of. Except that Billy the Kid is most certainly a real person, named William H. Bonne (pronounced like bonnie). The mythology surrounding him is because there is some mystery concerning his death, and the fact that he was initially a lawman, and eventually became an outlaw.

The cowboys and indians thing is sort of mythology though. Technically the "Cowboys" were one of the first organized crime units in the west. They wore a yellow bandana (or was it red?) to symbolize being part of the group.

If you want true mythology, then you're looking more along the lines of "Buffalo Bill" and the like.

@Splunge - Thanksgiving is a VERY celebrated holiday here in the U.S. In fact, it is the most travelled-for holiday of the year. In addition to the practical reasons of no one being able to eat a whole turkey by themselves, I think the true reason is that it cuts across lines of race, creed and ethnicity. For example, Jewish people don't celebrate Christmas or Easter, but everyone celebrates Thanksgiving.