Thanksgiving should be a personal and national starting point

I found a copy of Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation setting aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanksgiving on a website called “Abraham Lincoln Online.”

I knew Lincoln had issued the proclamation, but I never read it, nor knew of its background. According to the website, Lincoln had issued such proclamations before, but never something on a national level.

On Sept. 28, 1863, he received a letter from the 74-year-old editor of Godey’s “Lady’s Book,” Sarah Josepha Hale, urging him to have the “day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival.” Hale explained tha...