when is Thanksgiving?

[calimac]

It's a simple question. In the US, it's the fourth Thursday in November. You'd think that'd be easy to figure out. But apparently it's difficult.

This year, for instance, because November starts on a Friday, the rest of Thanksgiving weekend, from Friday on, is the fifth week of November. This seems to have confused a lot of people into expecting Thanksgiving on the fourth weekend, i.e. the 21st instead of the 28th. (Remember, remember, fifth weekend November / football games, leftovers brought / I see no reason the Thanksgiving season / Should ever be forgot.)

For instance, the glossy, attractively-designed, nicely-printed holiday garbage and recycling collection schedule that the city just sent out on a large postcard. As usual, collection services for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, and the rest of the days of that week are all pushed to the following day. That much is on their web sites, but the specific dates for this year are only on the postcard, which says "Thursday, Nov 21 -> Friday Nov 22; Friday Nov 22 -> Saturday Nov 23." Oops. I hope a sufficiency of people are phoning them up to say, "You clowns, didn't you check a calendar?"

But checking a calendar may not help! My pocket calendar for this year has it right, but I was just transferring info to next year's and discovered that it tells me that Thanksgiving will be on Tuesday, Nov. 25.

The prize for awesome stupidity in calendar-making, however, goes to a decorative appointment book I once saw which put 31 days in June and made up for it by omitting July 6. Even Pope Gregory would have been baffled by that one.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

When and by whom was the "fourth Thursday in November" rule decided, as a matter of interest?

To be honest, I hadn't realized that Thanksgiving came with a weekend attached. If it had been on a Wednesday, perhaps that wouldn't have happened.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Originally, Thanksgiving was an entirely ad hoc holiday. Whenever there was reason to give thanks (the end of a war, say), the President would issue a proclamation naming a day of thanksgiving, which was observed as a holiday (what in the UK would be called a bank holiday). Could be on any day. The idea of doing it annually at the end of November came around the time of the Civil War (ours, not yours, of course); why Thursday, I don't know, but around 1940 it was changed from the last Thursday of Nov to the 4th Thursday to allow more time for the Christmas shopping season in years that November ran late, if you know what I mean.

The result of that, of course, is that the day after Thanksgiving became a starting gun for Christmas shopping: sales, crowds, chaos, and so on. Now that Christmas decorations have seeped back into September the idea rings a little hollow, but it's still a big deal, and the idea of stores opening early on Friday for early shoppers gradually drifted back from 9 am to 6 am, 5 am, and then the previous day, i.e. Thanksgiving itself, to the irk of clerks who'd rather be home with their families.

The idea of offices (as opposed to stores) closing on Friday because they'd already be closed on Thursday is fairly old, and a four-day weekend provides plenty of opportunity for televised games of the sport of the season, which this being autumn is US football. So the traditional demotic American Thanksgiving family event is for everyone to gather on Thursday afternoon for a huge turkey dinner with other traditional foods (sweet potatoes, various winter squash, and cranberries among them). Then the males of the family spend the rest of the weekend dozing the tryptophan off while munching leftovers and watching football on TV, while the women go out shopping.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that - very illuminating. Several episodes of Friends fall into place at this point.

[danceswithwaves.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's just wow. I wonder who proofreads calendars...

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The same people who copyedit books, probably.