Hello friends! Welcome to a special Thanksgiving episode of Here's Work It's Interesting.

I am so excited that you're tuning in today, and we're going to step away from our series

on first ladies, but we are not going too far. Most of us know that the Thanksgiving holiday has been

traditionally celebrated by gathering with family and friends around a large feast.

Maybe there's some sports mall involved and a big parade. But as with all traditions,

Thanksgiving has taken a long time to evolve into its current state of celebration. So

let's dive in. Let's talk about when and how it actually became a federally acknowledged holiday.

And just for fun, we'll take a look at some of the ways Thanksgiving has been celebrated in the

White House over the years. Spoiler alert, there's a raccoon involved. I'm Sharon McVan,

and here's where it gets interesting.

Today we're going to skip the deep dive into the earliest origins of what we often call the

first Thanksgiving. During the 1600s, the relationship between colonists and indigenous tribes

was full of tension and complexity. As settlers began to take native land for their own agricultural

uses, it is much too nuanced to be summarized by the supposed sharing of a harvest meal.

We do know that there wasn't just one shared feast like we often learned in schools.

Autumn festivals were held yearly in many different settlements along the colonies

to celebrate a bountiful harvest, and this was not a unique practice that was brought to America

by European settlers. Indigenous tribes had long held their own harvest ceremonies and rituals.

The practice of observing a day of gratitude continued sporadically for the next 100 plus years.

In 1789, a man named Elias Budeno, who was a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts,

advocated that a day of Thanksgiving be held to thank God for giving the American people

the opportunity to create a constitution to preserve their hard-won freedoms,

...