NO ROTARY MEETING THIS WEEK - HAPPY THANKSGIVING!What do Rotary and Thanksgiving Day have in common? Both are international! Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday celebrated on various dates in Canada, the United States, Germany, Japan, some of the Caribbean islands, and Liberia. And contrary to our image of the first Thanksgiving being celebrated by the guys in funny hats and buckle shoes, days of thanksgiving and special religious services became important far earlier during the English Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII and in reaction to the large number of religious holidays on the Catholic calendar. Pilgrims and Puritans who emigrated from England in the 1620s and 1630s carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England. The modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition is traced to a well-recorded 1619 event in Virginia and a sparsely documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts.