Neither the 29th nor the 30th: the reason why Thanksgiving can never be celebrated on these days in November
By law, the Thanksgiving Day national holiday cannot happen any later than November 28 in the United States.
Households across the United States will this year be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday November 28 - the national holiday’s latest possible date.
What dates can Thanksgiving Day take place on?
A harvest celebration and, in the words of the US government, a chance for Americans to “express gratitude for the good things in life”, Thanksgiving Day is held every year in the States on the fourth Thursday in November.
Established by Congress as the federal holiday’s chosen day just over eight decades ago, the fourth Thursday of November falls within a week-long window of possible dates: it does not occur before the 22nd or after the 28th.
A festival whose origins are traced back to a 1621 harvest celebration held by English colonists and Wampanoag Native Americans in today’s Massachusetts, Thanksgiving has not always stuck to the current schedule.
“Day of Publick Thanksgivin”
Per the US National Archives, the country’s first president, George Washington, proclaimed Thursday November 26, 1789 as a “Day of Publick Thanksgivin” - but in the years that followed, the celebration was observed on a range of dates, including days in other months.
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln then issued a proclamation setting the date of Thanksgiving as the final Thursday of November.
4th Thursday becomes Thanksgiving by law under FDR
As November sometimes has five Thursdays, this meant that the holiday could fall as late as the last day of the month. When that occurred under the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, Roosevelt sought to bring Thanksgiving forward by a week, citing concerns over the economic impact of a shorter Christmas shopping period.
Not all states agreed to the change, so there was a brief period in the US’s history when Americans observed Thanksgiving on different Thursdays in November, depending on which part of the country they were in.
Within two years, however, a unified Thanksgiving date had been established once more in the US. In early December 1941, the House of Representatives and the Senate agreed to set November’s fourth Thursday as the holiday’s official date, in a congressional resolution that was signed by President Roosevelt on Boxing Day that year.
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