Thanksgiving is a traditional family holiday celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November. The holiday we celebrate has its origins from the earliest time of our forefathers. The day was not a formal holiday by any means. Originally, a day of thanksgiving was declared by colonists after a particular good harvest. The celebration was declared locally immediately after the harvest. It is conceivable that one colony would declare a day of thanksgiving and another colony might not. It all depended on the harvest.
In 1619, Thanksgiving, was celebrated in the Virginia colony as a matter of local law. On Dec. 4, 1619, 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred, 8,000 acres on the north bank of the James River, about 20 miles from Jamestown.
At that time, the settlers’ charter mandated that there would be a celebration of thanks to God on the anniversary of their arrival each year. However, three years later the settlers were attacked by the local Native Americans and a third of the settlement was killed. The settlement was abandoned and the remaining settlers returned to Jamestown.
However, the Pilgrims at Plymouth are frequently credited with the holding the nation’s “first thanksgiving” when after a particularly hard winter a Native estranged from his tribe lived among the Pilgrims and helped them survive. Squanto, a Patuxet Native American of the Wampanoag tribe, taught the Pilgrims how to catch eel and grow corn and served as an interpreter. After Squanto helped them they set apart a day to celebrate after their first harvest. However, the day was not designated a thanksgiving.
As the country’s first president, George Washington recognized that people need to give thanks for the survival of the fledgling country hurting from the ravages of the Revolutionary War. On Oct. 3, 1789, George Washington designated the first national Thanksgiving Day.
There was not another day of thanksgiving declared until 1795. Thanksgiving Days were declared sporadically by the ensuing presidents. Not all of these were in the fall or designed to celebrate the harvests. By the year 1858 the idea of a thanksgiving celebration was beginning to catch hold. During that year, 25 states and two territories each celebrated a day of thanks.
The idea of a national day of thanks came closer to the modern reality when, influenced by a series of editorials by Sarah Josepha Hale, Abraham Lincoln declared a national Thanksgiving Day. Lincoln designated the last Thursday of November as the day in 1863.
The tradition continued until 1939 when Franklin D. Roosevelt, trying to stimulate the retail industry changed the day to the Thursday before last to be a better day that would give retailers more opportunity to sell goods before Christmas.
However, there were many who had already made the last Thursday celebration a tradition and Roosevelt’s declaration was ignored by over half of the country.
In 1941, Congress decided to change the day to the fourth Thursday in the November and made the date a matter of public law.