THANKSGIVING'S CHRISTIAN MESSAGE OF LOVE: Thanksgiving is celebrated in the Phillippines, Liberia, Canada, Guam, South Korea, some of the Carribbean region etc, and there were forerunners of it throughout Germanic and Slavic speaking nations. The Bible records that God told the people of Israel to celebrate an annual harvest festival. So it is false when some people claim Thanksgiving is unbiblical or a nationalistic holiday for the U.S. alone although various colonies had Thanksgiving, George Washington made it into a national holiday and it was not regularly celebrated in the U.S. until Abraham Lincoln.
About 1608 English traders sailed to what we now call Plymouth, Massachusetts. Wampanoag Indians came out to trade, and English captured and took them to Spain to sell as slaves. One named Squanto was bought by a kind monk who taught him Christianity. Squanto went on to England and worked in stables for John Slaney who sent him home in 1619. Squanto found his village wiped out by disease. A year later English families arrived in a ship, he greeted the startled Pilgrims in English and taught them how to survive. When he lay dying of a fever, the colony's Governor wrote that Squanto had him pray for him and gave the Pilgrims his possessions to the Pilgrims "as remembrances of his love."
The Pilgrims, although having the first Thanksgiving celebration in North America and valuing religious tolerance for themselves, were so know-it-all, judgmental, rigid and harsh in their beliefs that later arrivals moved away to found new colonies and the Pilgrim religion itself eventually died out.