People have a good time Thanksgiving with parades, feasts and soccer By Reuters

By Daniel Trotta

(Reuters) – The US marked the Thanksgiving vacation on Thursday with conventional feasts, parades and American soccer, taking a second to have a good time in every week shadowed by gun violence.

The official vacation dates to the Civil Conflict, when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the final Thursday of November as a day to present thanks and search therapeutic. U.S. schoolchildren be taught to hint the vacation to Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and celebrated the autumn harvest with the Wampanoag peoples. Amongst Native People, Thanksgiving is a day of darkish reflection on the genocide that adopted.

People had been mourning this yr within the wake of a pair of lethal shootings. On Saturday, an attacker opened fireplace in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing 5 folks. On Tuesday, a Walmart (NYSE:) worker gunned down six coworkers and turned the gun on himself in Chesapeake, Virginia.

These had been simply two of the greater than 600 mass shootings thus far this yr, in keeping with the Gun Violence Archive, utilizing the definition of 4 or extra shot or killed, not together with the shooter.

President Joe Biden, visiting a firehouse on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, to thank first responders on Thanksgiving, instructed reporters he would try and cross some type of gun management earlier than a brand new Congress is seated in January, presumably renewing his try and ban assault weapons.

“The concept we nonetheless permit semi-automatic weapons to be bought is sick. It is simply sick. It has no, no social redeeming worth, zero, none. Not a single solitary rationale for it besides earnings for gun producers,” Biden mentioned, presumably referring to sure rifles as many widespread and fewer deadly weapons are additionally semi-automatic.

Earlier Biden phoned into presenters of the Macy’s (NYSE:) Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, a televised extravaganza of marching bands, floats and performances by stars together with Dionne Warwick, who sang the basic “What the World Wants Now.”

The Bidens continued a household custom of assembly on Nanctucket for Thanksgiving. The strategy of the lengthy vacation weekend sometimes ignites a frenzy of journey as scattered households come collectively from throughout the nation for vacation meals.

Midnight after Thanksgiving additionally marks the unofficial begin of the Christmas buying season, providing a snapshot of the state of the U.S. economic system.

Televised American soccer serves because the backdrop to turkey dinners with mounds of aspect dishes and desserts. The Nationwide Soccer League was staging three video games Thursday.

Thanksgiving additionally prompts an outpouring of donations to the poor and hungry, a process sophisticated by avian flu outbreaks which have eradicated about 8 million turkeys, making the massive birds extra scarce and thus dearer this yr. Manufacturing of turkey meat this yr is forecast to fall 7% from 2021, in keeping with U.S. authorities knowledge.