Thanksgiving is truly a North American holiday, having its origins in the earliest days of the settling of what is now the United States.

Despite the meticulous histories of the nation, there are some gaps that lend an air of mystery to the day many of us celebrate by consuming at least one huge meal and collapsing in front of the television to watch football games. Who had the first thanksgiving celebration – Plymouth, Mass., or Jamestown, Va. – and just what has Vicksburg got to do with Thanksgiving are but two of the mysteries.

To discuss the elder mystery first:

Most Americans are taught from kindergarten on that the Pilgrims, a group of English religious dissidents fleeing oppression in the 1620s, are generally credited with celebrating the first Thanksgiving Day in 1621 with some of the more friendly Native Americans in the area around Plymouth.

But another British colony in the new world could have a valid claim to having &#8220invented” the holiday, too.

Another company of adventurers seeking wealth in the New World had obtained a charter from King James of England and settled in 1609 on the coast of what is now Virginia, naming their settlement Jamestown. After struggling for several years before finding a crop they could sell for cash, the colonists hit on tobacco production.

If Jamestown’s claim is believed, they celebrated the first Thanksgiving on Dec. 4, 1619. In all likelihood, Jamestown’s celebration was a religious one to give God thanks for the arrival of ships bringing in fresh supplies of food and more colonists.

Contemporary writings indicate the celebration in Massachusetts featured feasting to celebrate the good harvest the colonists had following their first winter of privation. Specifically mentioned among the foods consumed was venison brought in by the Native Americans, and ducks and geese that Gov. William Bradford sent four men out to hunt.

Other foods likely on the table for those three days of feasting were boiled pumpkin and fried bread made from their corn crop. They could not make pie from the pumpkin or other types of bread because they had exhausted their meager supplies of flour. The feast was likely rounded out with fish, berries, watercress, lobster, dried fruit, clams and plums.

Although today’s traditional main course of roast turkey could have been there, it is more likely that the bird in question would have been a domesticated version rather than the wild variety. The Spaniards brought domesticated turkeys from Mexico in the 1500s and these birds were found in many parts of Europe by the 1600s. It is possible the Pilgrims brought some of these domestic birds to the New World and could have served them at their feast.

Through the years other days of thanksgiving were proclaimed to mark specific events in the development of what has become the United States.

The first national day of thanksgiving was proclaimed by George Washington in 1789, but it was a one-time affair.

In the 1800s, the next strongest move toward a national Thanksgiving Day gathered momentum when Sarah Josepha Hale, a magazine editor, began a campaign of editorials and letters to presidents and governors. Her efforts finally bore fruit in 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation on Oct. 3 establishing the last Thursday of November of that year as a national day of thanksgiving.

Was it a coincidence that Lincoln chose the year 1863 in which to proclaim a Thanksgiving Day or was there more to it than that?

America was a divided nation during that time and 1863 was the year in which Union forces won two pivotal victories in the War Between the States: Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

Some historians say that’s Vicksburg’s connection. Lincoln issued the proclamation in gratitude for the united nation he believed was imminent.

It was not until the World War II period that Thanksgiving Day became a fixed and permanent national holiday. In 1941, Congress approved a measure setting the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day and adding it to the list of the nation’s legal holidays.

And that’s how it is, for now.