Why Thanksgiving Is Today
In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved up Thanksgiving. Traditionally it had been celebrated on the last Thursday of November, but the nation’s largest retailers contended that there weren’t enough days between Thanksgiving and Christmas to allow everyone to complete their holiday shopping. The holiday now falls on the fourth Thursday, even when there are five in the month.
The decision was a “shattering” of precedent, as was noted in The Times that year, one that changed a tradition set by Abraham Lincoln more than 70 years before. Not everyone was pleased.
A man in South Dakota accused the president of stripping Americans of their idealism and morale. A woman in Brooklyn, addressing the president as His Excellency, asked why her school in New York must be forced to celebrate the holiday on a different day than her family in Connecticut. Even a man in the calendar business complained.
The president, however, had spent the previous several years trying to pull the nation out of the Great Depression, and fostering more consumer spending was one way of stimulating the economy.
This change tracks with the history of modern retailing, and it spawned new traditions of its own, namely Black Friday. Personal consumption makes up a bigger part of the American economy than that of almost any other industrialized country, but in recent years, the tradition of shopping the day after Thanksgiving seems to have lost its distinctive edge.
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