Thanksgiving Day - when is it? 

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When is Thanksgiving Day?

Thanksgiving Day in the USA is held on the fourth Thursday of November each year.

Apart from the initial celebration of the arrival of supply ships in 1610, the next recorded Thanksgiving Day event was in 1621.

However it wasn’t until 168 years later that the first President of the USA, George Washington, named November 26th 1789 as Thanksgiving Day. However this and subsequent Thanksgivings, issued as proclamations by presidents, were one-off events and not necessarily annual.

In 1827, Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879) began lobbying several Presidents for the instatement of Thanksgiving as a national holiday (she also wrote the nursery rhyme "Mary had a little Lamb".). Her lobbying was unsuccessful until 1863 when Abraham Lincoln finally made it a national holiday to be celebrated on the last Thursday of November.

However each of these was performed as individual, annual, proclamations. The presidents that followed Lincoln continued to make the event the last Thursday of November.

Confusion resulted with twenty-three States declaring Nov 23rd to be Thanksgiving, another twenty-three making it a week later on the 30th. Two States, Texas and Colorado had a holiday on both days. The same thing happened a year later. there was Thanksgiving and then there was "Franksgiving".

Finally, in 1941, the United States Congress finally declared to be the fourth Thursday of November. However as the calendars already had been printed for the third Thursday the ruling did not come into force until 1942.

United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, broke with tradition under pressure from the National Dry Goods Association: He declared that Thanksgiving Day should be the penultimate Thursday in November. The reason for the pressure was so that there were more weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The situation in Canada was rather simpler, since their Thanksgiving Day is much earlier, due to harvest coming earlier. It was in 1879 that the Canadian Parliament declared the 6th November as Thanksgiving Day. The date slowly drifted back over the years until it became the third Monday in October. Finally in 1957 the day was fixed as the second Monday in October.