Thanksgiving reflections of the past, for the present Published Nov. 17, 2006 By Chief Master Sgt. Scott Kilbride 305th Air Mobility Wing command chief MCGUIRE AIR FORCE BASE, N.J. -- This time of year inspires us to count our blessings and to reflect and celebrate with our family and friends on the most traditional American holiday -- Thanksgiving. Festivals of Thanksgiving in America have been observed as early as the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation in 1620. One year later, after the first harvest was completed, the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest fest. But unlike our modern holiday, it lasted for three days. Our modern Thanksgiving holiday was born in 1789 when a Congressional Joint Committee approved a motion set forth by Elias Boudinont, a representative from Massachusetts, 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. President George Washington proclaimed that the people of the United States observe a "day of public thanksgiving and prayer" for Thursday the 26th of November. President John Adams and President James Monroe also proclaimed similar days of thanksgiving some time during their terms of office. On Oct. 3, 1863, boosted up by the Union victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln officially proclaimed that a national Thanksgiving Day be observed every year on the fourth Thursday of November. Ever mindful of history, Lincoln may have correlated the date to the anchoring of the Mayflower at Cape Cod in the last week of November in 1620. Seventy-six years later, President Franklin Roosevelt, in order to give depression-era merchants more selling days before Christmas, chose the third Thursday of November in 1939 and 1940 to be Thanksgiving Day. However, this change was met with widespread resistance, largely because the change required rescheduling traditional Thanksgiving Day football games and parades. Finally in 1941, a Congressional Joint Resolution officially set the fourth Thursday of November as a national holiday for Thanksgiving. A little over a month after making his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, President Lincoln would make the lonely late-night train journey to Gettysburg, Pa., where he was asked to deliver a few appropriate closing remarks at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery. Lincoln was not the featured speaker that day. The Honorable Edward Everett, considered to the nation's greatest orator of his time, was listed in the official program as the oration speaker and Lincoln as the giver of dedicatory remarks. Everett spoke for more than two hours. While he listened, Lincoln fussed with the wording of his own remarks and then rose to speak. He spoke for less than three minutes -- 246 words -- and despite Lincoln's prediction that "... the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here ..." his words would in fact be forever etched in our hearts and minds. Lincoln's words that day went beyond the simple act of dedicating the hallowed grounds of a cemetery to those brave men who had fallen. His message redefined the Civil War not merely as a struggle between the North and the South, but as an epic struggle for the living to restore the nation and thus preserve the ideals of a democracy in the form of a great republic -- the independent offspring of the free will of the people -- dedicated to bringing true equality to all of its citizens: "... it is for us the living rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that his nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom --and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." Today, these words remind us that there is much work to be done as we move forward to defeat global terrorism -- the epic struggle of our time for our generation. Our struggle goes beyond the mountains of Afghanistan and the cities of Iraq. Our struggle stretches to every corner of the world darkened by terrorism and the evil it portrays --injustice, discrimination, lawlessness, poverty and oppression. The defeat of terrorism does not merely mean the end of a war. Rather, the defeat of terrorism will evermore secure and preserve human kind for us and our children for generations to come. And let us find comfort in more of Lincoln's words, "... the struggle of today is not altogether for today, it is for a vast future also ..." As you sit down to your Thanksgiving feasts this year, please pause to remember those who have fallen in this struggle and the families they left behind. On this day of Thanksgiving, let us all take a moment and rededicate ourselves to the unfinished work of ensuring all people of the world share in our cherished American principles of freedom and liberty -- eternally free from oppression.