Thanksgiving on Thursday by Mary Pope Osborne

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    I first came across your Magic Tree House series when my son brought one home … I have since introduced this great series to my class. They have absolutely fallen in love with these books! … My students are now asking me for more independent reading time to read them. Your stories have inspired even my most struggling readers.
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—R. Gale
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—K. Mahoney

Dear Readers,
    When I did research for Thanksgiving on Thursday , I learned something I hadn’t known before. I learned that what we generally think of as the first Thanksgiving—the 1621 feast with the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people of Plymouth Bay—was not a day set aside to give thanks. It was a three-day festival to celebrate a good harvest. During that time, the Pilgrims and Wampanoag shared many meals. Even so, we traditionally think of this harvest festival as the first Thanksgiving. More than two hundred years later, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln designated the last Thursday in November as America’s national day of Thanksgiving.
    I love doing the research for Magic Tree House books because I always learn something new. I hope you’ll learn lots of new things, too, when you visit the “first Thanksgiving” with Jack and Annie.
    Â Â Â Â 
All my best,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 



Text copyright © 2002 by Mary Pope Osborne
Illustrations copyright © 2002 by Sal Murdocca
    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
    www.randomhouse.com/magictreehouse
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Osborne, Mary Pope.
Thanksgiving on Thursday / by Mary Pope Osborne; illustrated by Sal Murdocca. — 1st ed. p. cm.—(Magic tree house; #27) “A stepping stone book.”
SUMMARY: Jack and Annie travel in their magic tree house to the year 1621, where they celebrate the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians in the New Plymouth Colony.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89484-8
[1. Thanksgiving Day—Fiction. 2. Pilgrims (New Plymouth Colony)—Fiction. 3. Plymouth