Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

This is a special episode.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day.

That is, of course, if you are an American, Puerto Rican, Mexican, or Brazilian, all four of those places,

celebrate Thanksgiving on the

fourth Thursday of November, and I thought on this occasion, we would walk through the history

of Thanksgiving as a holiday in the United States. We have to go back to colonial times,

and we could go up to New England, Massachusetts, and at various times, at the end of the 1600s, the colony of

Massachusetts or the colony of Connecticut, would issue Thanksgiving proclamations and set aside a day

for fasting and prayer and the giving of thanks for all of God's blessings. These tended to be in

November, sometimes in early December. But the Virginians

have New England beat. The first recorded act of Thanksgiving by English colonists in North

America occurred in Virginia on December 4, 1619.

But Florida has Virginia beat even still.

These, however, were not English colonists.

These were Huguenots, sailed all across the sea,

landed on the coast of Florida,

set up Fort Caroline just north of St. Augustine.

And way back in 1564, we had our first Thanksgiving

Day service on American soil, as they sang hymns, as they gave prayers of Thanksgiving, and as they

had a feast. Well, as we move along in the colonial era,

let's move forward to March 16, 1776.

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