Bob’s Journal

Happy Thanksgiving 2024

I’m once again putting retirement finance analysis aside this week to let you know that my wife, Elaine, and I are thankful for the opportunity to help each of you establish and maintain your independence and security during retirement.

Over the years, I’ve seen many alternatives to Retirement Watch come and go. So, I’m grateful that for more than 30 years I’ve had the privilege to provide this service to so many people.

I appreciate the many readers who let me know through email, letters and conversations how Retirement Watch helped them achieve their financial goals.

As I’ve done a few times in the past, in honor of the holiday and because Elaine and I like history, this week I provide some Thanksgiving history.

Most people believe the first Thanksgiving took place in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

I don’t want to upset any of my readers and friends in the Bay State, but the first English Thanksgiving in the United States took place along the James River, on what now is called Berkeley Plantation outside Richmond, Virginia. It occurred more than a year before the Pilgrims landed in Massachusetts.

Each year on the first Sunday in November, there’s a Virginia Thanksgiving Festival to commemorate the event.

You can learn more about the first Thanksgiving here.

As I’ve pointed out in Retirement Watch, something might not be true or accurate, even when it’s widely believed and repeated, whether the subject is history, finance or something else. Sometimes the consensus view is accurate. Other times, it is way off.

That’s why at Retirement Watch, I focus on independent, objective research, though it takes more time and other resources to deliver.

I close this week with a little more history.

George Washington declared the first official Thanksgiving Day in the United States, but Abraham Lincoln is credited with establishing it as an American institution. Here’s the last part of President Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, issued in some of the darkest days of the Civil War:

“No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all 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. It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord.”

— Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation October 3, 1863