On 24th November, our North American fellows, staff, students and friends gathered together for the College’s popular Thanksgiving celebrations. The evening featured, drinks, speeches, and musical performances, as well as a banquet of traditional Thanksgiving dishes, such as roast turkey, cornbread, sweet potato casserole and pumpkin and pecan pies.
The annual festival commemorates an autumn harvest feast shared by the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans in 1621. However, it was not regularly celebrated as a federal holiday until 1863, when, during the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of ‘Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens’, to be celebrated on the last Thursday in November.
To learn more about Oxford University’s American Office, view our events calendar.