Dear clients and friends:
I hope this email finds you, your family, and friends, in the best of health and in great spirits! I am really so very pleased to write to you again on the occasion of our wonderful holiday of Thanksgiving!
As many of you know, the first Thanksgiving took place just a few months after the Pilgrims settled in what is today Massachusetts, but back then was simply known as the “New World”. These Pilgrims, having just escaped religious persecution in England, had miraculously survived a harsh Winter, and had begun to build homes and farm the land. Their autumn harvest feast in the year 1621, more than 400 years ago, was the beginning of the national holiday we know today!
While the holiday that we enjoy so much today is an interfaith, secular celebration, it wasn’t always so. Interestingly, most of the deeply religious Pilgrims of the time were Puritans of the Protestant faith who identified strongly with the Biblical story of the Israelites in Egypt. To the Puritans, their harsh journey to the New World was similar to the exodus of the Israelites. The Puritans viewed England as Egypt, and the English King as the Egyptian Pharaoh. They saw the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean as their Red Sea, and the New World as their Promised Land. In a way, they viewed their Thanksgiving feast a bit like the Jewish holiday of Passover, marking the Israelite Exodus from Egypt!
As our young nation grew to embrace many other religions and their people, the holiday of Thanksgiving developed right along with the country. It was designated by George Washington in 1789 as a day of thanksgiving and prayer to mark the adoption of the Constitution and government, and then proclaimed again by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as an annual national holiday and a day of thanksgiving.
All that is to say, isn’t it wonderful that this holiday of Thanksgiving looks like the tapestry of us, the citizens of this great nation of ours? In a way, this holiday has adapted and embraced us all, regardless of race, nationality, or religion!
And so, it is on the eve of this wonderful holiday that everyone here at Weinstein Construction joins you in thanks for the bounty that we received this year, and we wantyou to know that we are incredibly grateful for your friendship and fellowship!
