Wednesday, November 21, 2018

The Day the President Moved Thanksgiving



This is more of a true story than it appears. Franklin Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving from the last Thursday in November to the next-to-the-last Thursday, in  order to give retailers a longer Christmas shopping season. It was only in December of 1941 that congress set the date of Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday in November, which can occur as early as the 22nd (like this year) or as late as November 28th.

3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  2. In some circles this presidential decree was sarcastically referred to as "Franksgiving".

    And if you watch the movie "Holiday Inn", during the course of the film they used a series of interstitial shots of a calendar page to indicate which holiday – Washington's Birthday; Easter; Fourth of July; etc. – was being celebrated at the Inn.

    For November (Thanksgiving) the calendar page is animated with a cartoon turkey moving between the 3rd and 4th Thursday of that year before finally just giving up and shrugging his shoulders in confusion, in acknowledgement of the minor controversy created by this presidential proclamation.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Interesting! I'll have to keep my eye peeled the next time I see the movie.

    ReplyDelete