Thanksgiving is the most American of our holidays. But its origins are still disputed. To this day, both Massachusetts and Virginia lay claim to the first Thanksgiving celebration.

Here are the facts. In the fall of 1621, William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth colony, invited ninety Indian men to join fifty Pilgrims for a three-day festival. The food, by the way, was prepared and served by four women and two girls.

The men consumed the food and then rested. Some things never change!

The Pilgrims, however, never repeated this marathon feast, which people often refer to as "The First Thanksgiving," nor did the colonists label it a Thanksgiving.

Throughout the rest of the seventeenth century, New Englanders often had trouble agreeing on reasons for declaring a day of thanksgiving. Ministers often quarreled over whether a day of thanksgiving should center on a feast or a fast. (In general, feasting won out).

Virginians believe they have a stronger claim to the Thanksgiving tradition. In the fall of 1619, the English ship Margaret brought thirty-eight settlers to Virginia. Their sponsoring group, the Berkeley Company, declared that “the day of our ship’s arrival . . . shall be yearly and perpetually kept as a day of Thanksgiving.”

The colonists landed at the site of present-day Berkeley Plantation, on the James River, and they dutifully set aside a day for thanksgiving. Thereafter, the colonists conducted an annual prayer service, which is now reenacted each year on the first Sunday of November at Berkeley Plantation.

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, state and territorial governors occasionally called for days of thanksgiving. In 1851, for example, governor Brigham Young declared a thanksgiving for the Mormon territory of Utah.

In the process he expressed the interesting hope that the people would “cease their quarrels and [thereby] starve the lawyers.” Thanksgiving, however, did not become an annual national holiday until 1863.

This designation was largely the result of a crusading woman named Sarah Josepha Hale. She was the author of the poem, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the nation’s most widely read magazine.

Beginning in the 1820s, Hale had tirelessly campaigned to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday. By 1858, she had convinced almost every northern state governor to adopt the custom, and she viewed the event as a means of healing the growing sectional dispute over slavery.

Southerners, however, balked at adopting what they perceived to be a “Yankee holiday.” Henry Wise, the governor of Virginia, dismissed the idea as “claptrap.”

But Hale persisted. In September 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, she asked President Abraham Lincoln to declare the last Thursday in November a national Thanksgiving Day. A week later Lincoln issued a proclamation urging all Americans “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of Thanksgiving and Prayer to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”

Lincoln viewed his proclamation as an ecumenical message of hope and humility in the midst of the carnage of war. As he declared, “It is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon.”

Every president since Lincoln has reaffirmed the Thanksgiving holiday, although it took folks in the South a few decades after the Civil War to embrace “Lincoln’s holiday.”

It remains one of the few occasions that enable us to reflect on what we really value. It brings us together. It reminds us of where we came from. It helps fill the emptiness within us.

As we gather among family and friends to celebrate our many blessings, let us remember, in Lincoln’s words, that our good fortune has resulted from “a superior wisdom and virtue” not of our own making.

Through such simple acts of affirmation and thanksgiving, we communicate how much we truly care. May the inspiration of this special day remind us of our heritage and hopes and the dreams we share—not only for ourselves and our children, but for all of human kind—for a world free from hunger and hurt and filled with grace and peace.