The Political & Personal Rants of Sarah

I bet a lot of you didn’t know about the years where there were two Thanksgivings?

On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of the month to be a day of “thanksgiving and praise.” For the first time, Thanksgiving became a national, annual holiday with a specific date.

However Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 moved Thanksgiving to the second to the last Thursday of the month instead of the last to help boost retail sales. In 1939, the last Thursday of November was going to be November 30. Retailers complained to FDR that this only left 24 shopping days to Christmas and begged him to push Thanksgiving just one week earlier. It was determined that most people do their Christmas shopping after Thanksgiving and retailers hoped that with an extra week of shopping, people would buy more.

You can image what controversy this caused. Schools had to change their calendar in order for kids to have Thanksgiving off of school. Tests had to be rescheduled and vacation plans had to be changed. All calendars that were already printed for the year 1940 had to be reprinted with Thanksgiving now falling on the third Thursday of the month. Thanksgiving is a big day for football games, so the game schedule had to be examined. Political opponents of FDR and many others questioned the president’s right to change the holiday and stressed the breaking of precedent and disregard for tradition. Many believed that changing a cherished holiday just to appease businesses was not a sufficient reason for change. Atlantic City’s mayor derogatorily called November 23, the second to the last Thursday of the month, as “Franksgiving.”

In 1939, twenty-three states followed FDR’s change and declared Thanksgiving to be November 23. Twenty-three other states disagreed with FDR and kept the traditional date for Thanksgiving, November 30. Two states, Colorado and Texas, decided to honor both dates. In 1940, 31 states followed him with the earlier date and 17 kept the traditional date. It was in 1941, after the debate over the day on which Thanksgiving fell was tearing this country apart, that Congress passed a law declaring that Thanksgiving would occur every year on the fourth Thursday of November.