Greeting Card Campaign: Thanksgiving

Click here to download card.

Today is Thanksgiving Day this year (2013). In the United States, the modern Thanksgiving holiday has its roots in a celebration in around 1621 when the Pilgrims and Puritians celebrated their first decent harvest. Days of Thanksgiving were common in England  and were carried to the New England colonies as a religious celebration.  The tradition was continued in later years by the colonial governors and eventually a regular holiday until the late 1660s.

A variety of royal governors and church leaders would make the annual Thanksgiving proclamations. During the Revolution General Washington did it one year as did the Continental Congress. George Washington became the first US president to make a nation-wide day of  thanksgiving proclamation, marking November 26, 1789, "as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God".

Traditions have grown up around the holiday such as the annual official proclamation and the pardoning of a turkey by the president. The "pardon" is supposed to insure the turkey lives out its life running around the farm without fear of its life. There are some nasty rumors that some past presidents went ahead and ate the bird on the sly on the grounds that it was only a one day pardon, I suppose. Sounds like something Taft would have done.
  
So today is the day to thank your Pocahontas that her favorite big old turkey is thankful for her with this downloadable free printable Thanksgiving Day card.  Just click on the caption below the picture of the turkey above. Remember, instead of printing from Google Docs, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "Download" and copy the file to your own computer.  Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you use and print the card from there. For some reason Google Docs doesn't handle fonts well, even though they are supposed to be embedded in the PDF document itself. 

This is a top fold card, so when it prints, be sure to tell your printer it's in "portrait" format so you get the whole file. Flip it on the short side to print double-sided. This also flips the inside upside down from the outside when you print in portrait mode, so that, when you fold it over, the inside comes out right side up.  If you're confused, I encourage you to give it a try with a practice sheet. 

© 2013 by Tom King