Days of gratitude

In Switzerland’s rural northwest canton of Jura, several churches gathered together for a 24-hour prayer event from noon Saturday to noon Sunday in mid-September. In the central village of Alle, a lineup of worship bands led prayer and praise services through the night, culminating with a joint service in a community meeting hall, where local mayors and dignitaries also attended. What might sound like a regional revival service was actually a celebration of the country’s official day of National Fasting and Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving in the United States is seen as a quintessentially American holiday, dating back to the Pilgrims in 1621. But the holiday’s roots are found in harvest festivals once celebrated in Europe, including the Mayflower passengers’ home country of England and their place of exile, the Netherlands.

In some countries, thanksgiving festivals continue to this day. Here are four places where people observe special days of thanks.

Switzerland

The Swiss day of National Fasting and Thanks­giving dates from the 16th century, when the future looked bleak for the Swiss Confederation in the face of natural disaster, epidemics, and wars. Amid conflicts between Catholics and Protestants that persisted into the mid-1800s, several individual cantons instituted days of fasting and prayer for peace. It became a countrywide observance in 1832, when parliament decreed a day for “thanksgiving, penitence, and prayer,” held the third Sunday in September. While many see it as an outdated religious event, Protestants, and evangelicals in particular, still observe the Federal Fast. Churches hold joint worship services bringing together believers to pray for the nation and government.

Most churches in the Jura region number under 100 people, so having 500 singing together is an encouraging experience for local Christians. After the worship service at Alle ended, attendees pushed chairs aside to make room for tables laden with cheese, wine, bread, and local sausage so worshippers could break their 24-hour fast together.

Nigeria

Each spring, Ben Anachebe leaves Abuja, Nigeria, for his hometown in southeastern Imo state to join an annual thanksgiving festival called Ikeji. Ikeji is one of the variations of the New Yam Festival, common across several Nigerian tribes, where the central theme is thanksgiving for a bountiful harvest of the staple crop. It’s also an opportunity for family members to reunite. Anachebe has fond memories of riding piggyback as a child on his father’s back through streets crowded with festivalgoers.

In Anachebe’s majority-Christian Igbo community, Ikeji takes place between March and April each year, coinciding with the end of planting and the start of the harvest season. The festival, stretching across four days, includes selling crops and livestock in the market, eating a communal meal from the new harvest, and attending parades.

Anachebe explains that while the festivities are rooted in tradition as a time-honored way families celebrated their crops, some participants still hold to ritualistic aspects linked to traditional spiritism, such as offering libations. But as a Christian, he chooses to focus on the tradition of thanksgiving that has been passed down. “It’s the way our ancestors gave thanks,” he says.

Ukraine

While not an official holiday in Ukraine, Thanksgiving is celebrated within the context of Christian traditions, especially during the harvest season. In western Ukraine, the holiday is often marked by family gatherings. At churches, Thanksgiving worship services include times of prayer for the nation, for its leaders, and for believers.

At Philadelphia Church in Kyiv, congregants celebrated Thanksgiving in late September, decorating the front of the church with grains, vegetables, and flowers from their personal harvests—a display of gratitude for the strength God gave to grow and gather it.

Worshippers offer prayers focused on various symbols. Ukrainians give special attention to bread—particularly a beautifully decorated loaf called korovai, which often bears symbols representing life, abundance, and suffering. Bread and wheat hold special significance in Ukrainian life in the context of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian Famine of the 1930s. “My great-grandfather taught us to collect every crumb of bread, emphasizing that it is something precious, not to be thrown away. Instead, if we have leftover bread, we should give it to the birds,” says Philadelphia member Mariia Voloshchuk.

Brazil

The history of Dia de Ação de Graças in Brazil is a unique story of cultural influence. After attending a Thanksgiving celebration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City in 1909, Brazilian Ambassador Joaquim Nabuco proposed the idea of importing the holiday back home. Though it took 40 years, in 1949 President Gaspar Dutra followed Nabuco’s suggestion and declared a National Day of Thanksgiving as a show of cultural unity.

In 1966, the Brazilian Congress fixed the holiday’s observance to the fourth Thursday of November—the same Thanksgiving date as the United States. However, Brazilian culture never broadly adopted it, and it remains observed only by some Brazilians.

As an imported holiday, the feast includes American Thanksgiving dishes such as sweet potatoes and peru (“turkey” in Portuguese). But Brazilians also add their own culinary taste: They often substitute cranberry sauce with their endemic jaboticaba fruit.