U.S. Mission Closed Thursday for Thanksgiving

November 22, 2006

The U.S. Mission in Nepal will be closed on Thursday, November 23, to celebrate Thanksgiving Day, a U.S. holiday. The Embassy, USAID, and the Consular Section and the American Center in the Yak & Yeti complex comprise the Mission. 

Each year on the fourth Thursday in November, families across the United States gather at their homes to share a meal in thanksgiving for the good fortune of the last year.  It is a historical, national, and religious holiday that began with the early European settlers to North America, the Pilgrims.  After surviving a bitter winter and gathering the bountiful autumn harvest, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony issued a thanksgiving proclamation in the autumn of 1621.  During the three-day holiday, the Pilgrims feasted on wild turkey with their Native American neighbors.

The custom of an annually celebrated Thanksgiving Day, held after the autumn harvest, continued through the years.  In 1863 President Abraham Lincoln became the first president to declare a national day of thanksgiving, and he did so during America’s worst crisis -- the Civil War.  Since then, each president has issued a Thanksgiving Day proclamation.

• More than 46 million turkeys are eaten during Thanksgiving, amounting to 690 million pounds of turkey meat.
• Ninety-seven percent of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving.
• Benjamin Franklin thought the turkey was so American it should have been chosen as our national symbol rather than the eagle.
• In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt advanced Thanksgiving Day one week to improve Christmas sales, but it failed because the people didn’t like it.
• When U.S. astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin sat down to eat their first meal on the moon in their historic 1969 voyage, their foil food packets contained roasted turkey and all the trimmings.
• The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day are a prime time for shopping in America.

Source:  The National Turkey Federation

NOTE: The Thanksgiving Day Proclamation by President George W. Bush can be viewed at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/11/20061116-8.html

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