Suzanne Fields says Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday.
Maybe, maybe not. People of many cultures, on many continents, have had harvest festivals in the fall. And I can’t tell for sure from here, but I’ll bet they have had contained some sense of acknowledgment of the source of all the harvest goodies.
One thing Thanksgiving is, though, is a religious holiday. And one of the neat things is that the extreme secularists don’t notice, probably because they don’t think about it hard enough. Those who are intent on the most extreme separation, not only of church and state, but of religion and public life, are so busy removing the word Christmas from official use that they don’t stop to think that the concept of Thanksgiving makes no sense except as an acknowledgement of the divine. They might argue that it’s a time for thanking each other, not thanking God. But thanking each other in the sense that there is any morality associated with it makes no sense if there isn’t a concept of God lurking in the background. I challenge anyone to try to make it otherwise. That is, I challenge anyone do any thanking without any “attaboy me” or “ought to”s or other morality associated with it.
Thanksgiving isn’t a religious holiday in a sectarian sense, like Christmas is, but in an abstract sense it is a religious holiday — perhaps the most purely religious holiday we have.