Why is Thanksgiving day always on a Thursday ?

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Why is thanks giving day held on a thursday , instead of a date ?

-- Max (MaxT@yoohoo.com), November 26, 2002

Answers

Th following is from World Book Encyclopedia.

Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, worked many years to promote the idea of a national Thanksgiving Day (see HALE, SARAH JOSEPHA). Then President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November 1863, as "a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father." Each year afterward, for 75 years, the President formally proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day should be celebrated on the last Thursday of November. But in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set it one week earlier. He wanted to help business by lengthening the shopping period before Christmas. Congress ruled that after 1941 the fourth Thursday of November would be observed as Thanksgiving Day and would be a legal federal holiday.

-- Stewart Campbell (stewartcampbell1@mac.com), November 10, 2003.


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