Sunday, November 19, 2006

American Thanksgiving, It Turns Out, Is This Week

Earlier this weekend, when I wanted to know whether our American friends would be carving their hapless turkeys on Thursday of this week, or the week after, I asked my American wife (which is not to say that I have more than one; she just happens to be American). She responded with, "Thanksgiving is always the last Thursday in November." That lead me to believe it was still almost two weeks away, since this Thursday is the 23rd, making the following Thursday the final one of the month.

But then we started seeing the ads and promo's for Turkey Day events happening this week, which put the lie to lovely Vicki's theory. I'm sure she'd say it's just a symptom of her living outside her country of birth for over thirty years now, and maybe it is. But she provided that information about the last Thursday in November with such conviction! So now I'm intrigued enough to look it up.

From Wikipedia:

"In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that Thanksgiving would be the next-to-last Thursday of November rather than the last. With the country still in the midst of The Great Depression, Roosevelt thought this would give merchants a longer period to sell goods before Christmas. Increasing profits and spending during this period, Roosevelt hoped, would aid bringing the country out of the Depression. At the time, it was considered inappropriate to advertise goods for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. However, Roosevelt's declaration was not mandatory; twenty-three states went along with this recommendation, and 22 did not. Other states, like Texas, could not decide and took both weeks as government holidays. Roosevelt persisted in 1940 to celebrate his "Franksgiving," as it was termed. The U.S. Congress in 1941 split the difference and established that the Thanksgiving would occur annually on the fourth Thursday of November, which was sometimes the last Thursday and sometimes the next to last."

Who says blogging's not educational? Nobody reading this site I hope! :-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting that it isn't the last Thursday....
It is the busiest airport day (Sunday after so be forewarned). And it is the weekend when the stores start to make a profit (how sad is that and I don't think that is true...Walmart couldn't possibly survive all year and only make profit in the last 5 weeks?)