Looking for a good Thanksgiving story to tell or share at your Thanksgiving dinner? Here are 4 intriguing stories to inform, encourage, and enlighten about this wonderful holiday. ♦

It’s my favorite time of year. The weather’s a bit nippy yet the sky is bright blue. The trees are in gorgeous transitions of color and the house is warm, cozy, and smells of good food. The kids and the grandchildren are talking and laughing while soft music is playing in the background.

The Thanksgiving Holiday weekend is a beautiful slow build into the Christmas season. A wonderful time for personal pause, reflection, appreciation, joy, and human interaction. A time to further connect, share stories and perspectives.

For those who are Christians, the Thanksgiving holiday maps well to one’s own thankfulness to God and a time of grateful reflection and celebration with friends and loved ones. For secularists or non-believers the holiday is still a wonderful time of family gatherings in peace and thankfulness.

Where all of us can be unified is in documented history and backstories surrounding Thanksgiving and its roots as an all-American holiday.

4 Stories
Here are 4 past Biblical Viewpoint stories about Thanksgiving that lend themselves to good reading with friends and family around a fireplace or even the dinner table this year.

1. Pilgrims Process – Acknowledging that their purpose was to glorify God, the Pilgrims had a clear vision and staked their very lives on following it. This story highlights the particulars in process around the small band of literal Pilgrims on the Mayflower ship and their compact with each other and shipmates before landing and establishing that first colony at Plymouth on the shores of Cape Cod. Read the story here.
2. The Indian Stranger – The first Thanksgiving in 1621 was celebrated with gratefulness for God’s provisions and survival, including a “special instrument sent of God…” This story presents the amazing divine intervention of an Indian named Squanto and the life-saving role he played in the first Thanksgiving. Read the story here.
3. A Pilgrim’s Hope and Loss – Here’s a Thanksgiving story you might have forgotten, or never knew. This story depicts the dark and harrowing experiences of the Pilgrims upon their initial landing at Cape Cod and the personal tragedy that struck their leader William Bradford even before all the Pilgrims departed the Mayflower. Read the story here.
4. Thanksgiving – the Economic Story – You know the Pilgrim story about the first Thanksgiving. Did you ever hear it as a lesson in human nature and economics? This story highlights the very real survival trials of the first Pilgrims that led to the experimental foundations of a new economic system that changed the course of history. Read the story here.

Have a Happy and Wonderful Thanksgiving!
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Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 4:6-7

Categories: Calling, Faith, Holidays, Thanksgiving

Tags: Mayflower, Mayflower Compact, Plymouth Rock, Squanto, thankfullness, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving stories, William Bradford