My first Thanksgiving is when I was really little, and I was at my Grandma's house. We had a really delicious dinner with all my relatives came over and we played games and prayed and the next morning we went to church. My grandpa is a deacon.

For dinner we had chicken and dumplings which are really yummy when my grandma makes them. We also had this huge turkey and I only got a small piece because I was about four, well this isn't my first Thanksgiving-- it's one of my earliest Thanksgivings. Well we also have mashed potatoes, they're really good too. Sometimes my grandma stuffs the turkey sometimes I don't know what she does. We also have all sorts of fruit and I also have an apple with no skin, well my mom cuts the skin off The family will sit by the fire and talk about our life because some of our relatives live some where else like our family. The kids would play ghost in the graveyard or a board game. The parents would just talk and talk and talk.

My family always goes to church to pray and for how brave the Pilgrims were for their journey. After church some people might go to a brunch and talk while others would go home and relax.

I like having Thanksgivings with my family, we get to see them every so often and that's fun for me since I live so far away from them now. But it is also nice to have a big dinner, and eat lots of yummy food and play games with my cousins. You know most people don't like going to church but the best time Ilike going to church a lot is on Thanksgiving Day, because you get to thank the Lord for all the things you have in your life. You also get to give thanks for the family and dinner you had. That's what I always thank the Lord for.

Other Internet Resources:

• US Holidays: Thanksgiving
• The Mayflower Web
• The Pilgrims in Leiden
• Plimoth Plantation's Web Site
• Send a Thanksgiving card to a friend
• KidProject: Thanksgiving in the USA
• KidProject: Thanksgiving in Canada

The Thanksgiving I am going to tell you about was the one this year, 1998. It was very different then the ones I celebrated in California. For one thing they don't celebrate it here in Holland so we didn't get six days off, but we did get to go to church in Leiden. Leiden is where the first Pilgrims built a church and lived. (Read about the Pilgrims in Leiden from this Dutch website.)

When I was in Leiden I visited the Pilgrims church. We stayed there for a one hour church service. After the service we saw some of the artifacts from the Pilgrims. Stuff like hair clips, old skeletons, pictures and old bedrooms. (Here are some official documents from the the Pilgrims in Leiden --in Dutch and English.)

We then went to an old house that a Pilgrim use to live in but now it is a museum. In the museum there was a table that had a basket of crayons. In the basket there were also some rocks shaped like crayons. What I did was take the rock crayon and draw on a flat piece of rock. The drawing looked really cool. This was one of my favorite Thanksgivings.