The Ark Valley Voice crew will be spending Thanksgiving Day with our families and friends this year and will not publish on November 24.
We sincerely wish our readers and friends a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday full of that for which you are most thankful. Our gratitude to our AVV readers and donors is heartfelt — we exist as a service to the community.
All of us have come through a lot in the past few years – weathering a pandemic and suffering the loss of those we love, economic upheaval and supply chain turmoil, and rhetoric that has served to divide rather than unite us. Let this be a time to consider that which unites us — rather than what divides us.
As Thanksgiving, 2022 arrives, we are mindful that our first President, George Washington, proclaimed the first national Thanksgiving in October, 1789 — practically his first official act of the new nation and a new presidency.
In October, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln set aside the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving in a divided nation proclaiming:
“The last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwells in the heavens And I recommend to them that while offering up the descriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, we with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all of those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility, and union.”
Amen.
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