This date is as well-known in our minds as the stars and stripes in the grand tapestry of American life, the history of thanksgiving. It is a day that brings the whole country to a stop. The familiar rituals happen all over the country: the smell of roasting turkey and pumpkin pie fills the air, the muffled roar of a football game comes from the living room TV, the gentle chaos of a family kitchen, and the distant, rising balloons of a morning parade. It is a day of coming home, being thankful, and sharing a national story that is sometimes hard to understand.
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The Origins Before Thursday Even Existed
We need to go back to a time in the history of Thanksgiving was anything but set in stone in order to understand how permanent the November Thursday is. According to historical records, the harvest feast we romanticize in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1621 lasted for three days and was attended by 50 colonists and 90 Wampanoag people. It was a celebration of survival and a successful harvest, but the Puritans didn’t call it “Thanksgiving,” and it wasn’t set for a certain day of the week.
The Lincoln Proclamation: The Beginning of the Tradition
Sarah Josepha Hale was that force of nature. As the influential editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated magazine in the antebellum United States, Hale wielded immense cultural power. From 1846 to 1863, she used her editor’s pen to fight for a national Thanksgiving holiday on a set day every year. She wrote countless editorials, published recipes for turkey and pumpkin pie (helping to standardize the menu), and lobbied presidents and governors directly with a stream of letters. She thought of Thanksgiving as a “Great American Festival” that could help bring the divided country together. Her chosen day? The last Thursday in November. It was both sad and lucky that she made her last successful push at that time. The Civil War was going on in the United States, and it was threatening to tear the country apart.
Why Thursday and Not Some Other Day?
Lincoln’s choice of a Thursday wasn’t random. It was a choice that came from the practical and religious patterns of life in 19th-century America. We need to let go of our modern way of thinking about five-day workweeks and two-day weekends in order to understand it. The week had a different rhythm in farming communities and even in early cities.
First and foremost, Thursday was a good day to travel. If you’ve ever wondered why your grandparents always talked about Thanksgiving as a family event that lasted more than one day, the answer is in the way things worked in the 1800s. For a society that relied on horse-drawn carriages and later, early trains, it could take a whole day or more to get to a family homestead. Because Thursday was a holiday, people could start their trips on Wednesday or even Tuesday, celebrate the feast on Thursday, and then have Friday to get back home without breaking the Sabbath. This was very important.
This brings us to the second reason: the Sabbath. In a country with strong Protestant traditions, Sunday was a day for church and rest. Some communities would have had problems with a Friday holiday because it would have gone against Catholic Friday fasting traditions. A Saturday holiday would have been a problem because it would have been the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sabbath. A Monday holiday would have meant traveling on a Sunday, which most people didn’t like. Thursday was the best day to take a break. It gave enough time between the last Sunday and the next one, and it also gave people a day to travel before the next one. It didn’t bother the weekend and respected its sacredness.
Third, there was a clerical issue. Ministers often had other things to do on Sundays that kept them from writing a sermon for a big holiday. Thanksgiving on a Thursday gave them plenty of time to hold a meaningful holiday service and get ready for their regular Sunday Sabbath duties.
The “Franksgiving” Controversy in Roosevelt’s Calendar War
For almost 75 years after Lincoln’s proclamation, the tradition stayed strong. People in the United States got used to the rhythm of “last Thursday in November.” It became a part of the culture and something that everyone accepted. Then, in 1939, something strange happened with the calendar: November had five Thursdays. This simple fact about astronomy started a national argument that would be called the “Franksgiving” debacle. The Great Depression was going on in the country, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt was always looking for ways to boost the economy.
The Math Behind the Earliest and Latest Possible Dates for the Holiday
