Apples, peaches, pumpkin pie! Who's ready for Thanksgiving, holler I!

I honestly love Christmas (a whole bunch, I do!), but I have noticed that stores are jumping the gun and skipping Thanksgiving.  It's early November, for goodness sake, and the mall is already playing Christmas music.  The Ashley Tisdale version of "Jingle Bell Rock" is nice, but please, friends, all in good time.  Let's give Thanksgiving its time...

Here are the details according to history.com:

In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. It wasn't until 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November.

 Yes, I know you learned that in preschool but we can all use friendly reminders of what we are actually celebrating :)

Here are some more fun facts about the best day in November.  

(All of these come from http://www.history.com/topics/thanksgiving-facts.)

Snoopy has appeared as a giant balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade more times than any other character in history. As the Flying Ace, Snoopy made his sixth appearance in the 2006 parade.

The first time the Detroit Lions played football on Thanksgiving Day was in 1934, when they hosted the Chicago Bears at the University of Detroit stadium, in front of 26,000 fans. The NBC radio network broadcast the game on 94 stations across the country--the first national Thanksgiving football broadcast. Since that time, the Lions have played a game every Thanksgiving (except between 1939 and 1944); in 1956, fans watched the game on television for the first time.

 According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest pumpkin pie ever baked weighed 2,020 pounds and measured just over 12 feet long. It was baked on October 8, 2005 by the New Bremen Giant Pumpkin Growers in Ohio, and included 900 pounds of pumpkin, 62 gallons of evaporated milk, 155 dozen eggs, 300 pounds of sugar, 3.5 pounds of salt, 7 pounds of cinnamon, 2 pounds of pumpkin spice and 250 pounds of crust.

Cranberry production in the U.S. was approximately 709 million pounds in 2009. Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington are the top cranberry growing states.

Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and New York are the major pumpkin growing states, together they produced 1.1 billion pounds of pumpkin in 2008, with a combined value of $141 million.

So please, friends, remember that you wouldn't be here if your parents hadn't chosen life, you wouldn't be reading this if your teachers weren't patient with you, you wouldn't be warm and cozy without the job you (or your parents) work hard at, and the Pilgrims wouldn't have made it without life-saving help from the Native Americans.  Remember most of all that God loves you and have a great November full of thanks!

photo from http://wordpress.rightfromtheheart.com/blog/2009/11/happy-thanksgiving/ (though I'm pretty sure that's not the original source :P)