Why other Holidays couldn't exist without the Celebration of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a unique holiday, it is an innate holiday; the day is not based on political triumph, war, nationality, or supernatural beliefs.   Give this a moment of thought; all other contemporary holidays have either political or religious foundations.  Halloween’s Celtic foundation involved blood sacrifices to the gods.  Even New Years, January 1^st is a subjective date based on the first month of the Gregorian calendar (also known the Christian calendar), if we were to celebrate a natural new year’s; we would do so on one of the solstices or equinoxes.  

Thanksgiving is fundamentally a celebration of farming; the ability to plant seed and harvest food for sustaining life.  

The first modern Thanksgiving took place November 21^st, 1621 in Plymouth Massachusetts.  This “First Thanksgiving” was a product of many thousands of years in the making.  Twelve thousand years ago, or more, groups of people in the Fertile Crescent – also known as the Cradle of Civilization – discovered mutated wild grains which when ripe did not open its pods to allow the seed to fall to the ground and germinate.  Meaning this wild grain could be harvested. These people planted the mutated grain, creating a new domesticated version of the wild grains; the side effect was this group of people became stable, living in one place – waiting for their crops.  They began to build settlements and after some number of generations, the human art of farming was established.  Sometime later farming independently took root in China and Mesoamerica as well, farming may have been autonomously established only three times.

For the first time, humans were able to produce food, instead of traveling to gathering food or following migrating herds.  Once humans were able to produce more food than one family could consume, it allowed for the foundations of civil specialization; one person could now feed many.   The people not directly producing food began to manage the production of crops.  In order to do so, in all three cases each group of people invented written language to describe, trace, and distribute food.   Soon these people with more and more free time became goldsmiths, masonries, carpenters, musicians, vintners, brewers, gaffer, educators, soldiers, politicians, and priests.  These specializations in turn allowed humans to build humanity.  Agriculture allowed urbanization, trade, writing, science, and religion.  The Mesopotamian, Semitic, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim gods all evolved in this ancient near east society fueled by agriculture.  Humans did not have writing or big gods before we had the harvest.  The harvest made all other inventions possible.

Today many people consider Christmas as the most important holiday.  If Christmas is your favorite holiday consider; without agriculture, not only would the authors of the New Testament Gospels not have had the time to specialize as authors, humanity would not have been able to specialize and create written language to bring the story to you.  None of the political or religious holidays would exist without farming.

Thanksgiving is unique; it is a holiday inclusive of all humanity, regardless of religion or nationality.  It is a celebration of the human art of agriculture; the creative skill of cultivation, combining seed and soil, to store solar energy in the form of organic matter.  At Thanksgiving, we come together, as family and friends to celebrate humanity’s greatest invention; the harvest.