[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 130 (Thursday, November 16, 2006)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11041-S11042]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THANKSGIVING 2006

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, next week, Americans across our great land 
will be celebrating one of our oldest and most beloved holidays, 
Thanksgiving.
  What a great and glorious holiday this is--a truly and uniquely 
American holiday. It is a day for giving thanks. A day devoted to 
family, to country, and to God. A day of eating turkey, sweet potatoes, 
mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, dressing, and pumpkin pie. It is a 
day of parades, football games, and the beginning of the Christmas 
holiday season.
  It is a day of family gatherings. Unfortunately, in too many homes 
this year, and as in the past 5 years, there will be too many empty 
seats at the dinner table. I hope everyone listening will join me in 
praying for our sons and daughters who are in harm's way in Iraq and 
Afghanistan, in praying for the eternal salvation of those who have 
died in these costly conflicts, and in praying for the speedy recovery 
of those who have been wounded. While we cannot hope to fill those 
empty chairs, we can hope that our prayers and our love and support 
will help to ease the sorrow at those tables.
  Even with the turmoil of the past year and with so many of our sons 
and daughters in faraway lands, we still have so much for which to be 
thankful.
  We are thankful for the Pilgrims--that courageous group of men and 
women who, in 1621, left their homes, crossed a mighty ocean, and 
settled in a strange, unknown wilderness so they could go to church so 
they could worship God as they pleased.
  After months of privation, suffering, hunger, sickness and death, 
these men and women had a great feast to thank

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God for being good to them. Think about it. With all the brutal 
hardships they had endured, with all the death and suffering they 
endured, they took time to have a great feast to thank Almighty God for 
being good to them. In the process, they gave us our first Thanksgiving
  We are thankful for the heritage of liberty bequeathed to us by our 
ancestors. We are thankful for the wisdom and the foresight of our 
Founding Fathers who bestowed to us a form of government unique in 
history, with its three strong pillars of executive, legislative, and 
judicial branches, each balanced and checked against one another.
  In fact, Mr. President, that is the very point I want to emphasize. 
The very first national observance of Thanksgiving, which came in 1789, 
was to thank Almighty God for His role in creating our great country, 
and His assistance in the forming of our Constitution.
  This happened when, in the very first Congress in 1789, 
Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey moved that a day of 
thanksgiving be held to thank God for giving the American people the 
opportunity to create a Constitution to preserve their newly won 
freedoms.
  The resolution, as approved by both Houses of the Congress, requested 
that a ``joint committee of both Houses be directed to wait upon the 
president of the United States, to request that he recommend to the 
people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving.''
  On September 26, 1789, the first Senate agreed to the House 
resolution, and a few days later a joint congressional committee 
delivered to President Washington a resolution ``desiring the president 
of the United States to recommend a day of general thanksgiving.''
  Within a few days, on October 3, President Washington issued the 
first national thanksgiving proclamation. Our first and perhaps our 
greatest President proclaimed Thursday, November 26, 1789, to be a day 
of national thanksgiving.
  That proclamation is a fascinating and informative document. It 
begins by proclaiming that, ``it is the duty of all nations to 
acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be 
grateful for His benefits, and humbly implore His protection and 
favor.''
  The Father of our country left no doubt about his belief that our 
Nation was not simply the creation of mere mortals but was, in fact, 
guided by a Divine Hand. As if to emphasize this point, his 
proclamation went on to praise ``that great and glorious Being who is 
the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will 
be.'' He exhorted the people of his young Republic to express their 
gratitude to Almighty God for his protection of them through the 
Revolutionary War. He wrote: ``We may then all unite in rendering unto 
Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of 
the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation.''
  That was George Washington. That was the basis of our first national 
Thanksgiving.
  But he was not through. This was a Thanksgiving proclamation, so he 
proceeded to give thanks. He asked the American people to be thankful 
to Almighty God for ``the civil and religious liberty with which we are 
blessed.''
  And he asked the American people to be thankful ``for the peaceable 
and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish 
constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and 
particularly the national one now lately instituted.''
  I hope everyone caught that. President Washington was thanking the 
Good Lord for the Constitution that created the American Government.
  At the request of our first President, citizens throughout the land 
assembled in churches on November 26, 1789, and thanked God for their 
government and asked Him for His Guidance in the years ahead. As for 
President Washington, he spent the day worshiping at an Episcopal 
church in Manhattan.
  As you celebrate this Thanksgiving, enjoy your families. Enjoy your 
Thanksgiving feasts. Enjoy your football games and your parades.
  But like President Washington, you might want to think about 
attending church on this great and glorious day and give thanks for our 
many blessings. Like President Washington, you may want to thank God 
for watching over the United States and for His assistance in the 
creation of our Constitution, our Nation's most basic and sacred 
document, which has guided and protected our country for more than 200 
years, through world wars, great depressions, and bitter, divisive 
elections.

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