A German Thanksgiving? Erntedankfest!: Some thoughts

» biogardener - Some thoughts

I have long thought about why the American Thanksgiving is the only thanksgiving celebration in the western world which has deteriorated into a secular holiday from the original day of thanksgiving to God for a bountiful harvest.

• It does not fall on a Sunday as it does in Europe and Canada where the day starts with a church service in which everyone brings some produce of the garden and the fields to display and later give away.
  
• Americans seem obsessed with the division of church and state and some bend over backwards trying to prove that their actions and celebrations are not influenced by religion.
  
• Part of the original American celebration includes interaction between races, and that may have given the holiday overtones of racial harmony which is detracting from the harmony between God and man.

I have never been in the US on that day, so my thoughts are based on what I hear on the Internet. I have created a poll about the meaning of Thanksgiving, and actually all that it proves is that most of my readers are Americans. You can vote in the poll and view the results in this article about the meaning of Thanksgiving.

The article gives you a glance at what Thanksgiving means to the generation of Germans who barely survived the tough days of the forties.

-- posted by biogardener