Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday in USA with its roots in a celebration of the annual harvest.
When is Thanksgiving Day?
- Fourth Thursday of November. In the US, Thanksgiving Day is celebrated every year on the fourth Thursday of November.
- This year, it falls on Thursday, November 28.
- President Abraham Lincoln was the first US president to officially declare the festival as the last Thursday in November.
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The date was set in stone by President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1939 and approved by Congress in 1941.
Why is it called Thanksgiving?
Blessing of the harvest. It began as a day where people took the opportunity of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year - In the US, the celebration is often recognised as an event
that took place when English colonists held a feast to thank Native
Americans for helping them start new lives in the US.
- "The First Thanksgiving" was celebrated after their first harvest in October 1621. The feast lasted three days.
- Five letters to five US presidents. After a long campaign, Sarah Joseph Hale, editor of Godey's Lady Book - a colonial women's magazine - is credited with making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the US.
- In support of the proposed national holiday, Hale wrote letters to five presidents of the US. The letter she wrote to Lincoln convinced him to support legislation establishing a national holiday of thanksgiving in 1863.
- "You may have observed that, for some years past, there has been an increasing interest felt in our land to have the Thanksgiving held on the same day, in all the States; it now needs National recognition and authoritative fixation, only, to become permanently, an American custom and institution," she wrote.
- Before Thanksgiving Day, the only national holidays celebrated in the US were Washington's Birthday and Independence Day.
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