When Is Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November.

--Days

--Hours

--Minutes

--Seconds

Why does the date move every year?

Because Thanksgiving is not a date, it is a rule: the fourth Thursday in November. Unlike Christmas or Halloween, which are pinned to a number, Thanksgiving is pinned to a weekday, so the calendar date slides around within a seven-day window. It can land anywhere from November 22 to November 28, and never outside that range.

Here is the detail almost everyone gets wrong: the fourth Thursday is not always the last Thursday. When November contains five Thursdays, the fourth one leaves a spare Thursday sitting after Thanksgiving. That distinction looks like pedantry. It caused a genuine national crisis.

Year	Thanksgiving	Also the last Thursday?

The year America had two Thanksgivings

From Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation onward, Thanksgiving was the last Thursday in November, set each year by presidential proclamation rather than by law. That worked until it collided with retail.

November 1939 had five Thursdays, so the last one fell on November 30, leaving a punishingly short run-up to Christmas. Retailers, still clawing out of the Depression, lobbied for relief. Franklin D. Roosevelt obliged and proclaimed Thanksgiving a week early, on the next-to-last Thursday, to buy the shopping season an extra seven days.

The country did not take it well. The mayor of Atlantic City, Charles D. White, dubbed it "Franksgiving", and the name stuck. Because the date was proclamation rather than statute, states simply decided for themselves: roughly half moved, the rest refused. Newspapers wrote about "Democratic Thanksgiving" and "Republican Thanksgiving". Families straddling state lines had to pick. College football schedules, built around the holiday, fell apart. For three years, when Thanksgiving happened depended on which state you were standing in.

Congress ended it in December 1941, passing a joint resolution that fixed Thanksgiving in law as the fourth Thursday in November. That was the compromise: it usually matches the old last-Thursday tradition, but in five-Thursday years it delivers exactly the earlier date, and the longer shopping season, that Roosevelt wanted. Both sides got something. The argument stopped.

Which is why, if you have ever wondered why the American Christmas shopping season begins with such violence the moment the turkey is cleared, the answer is that it was designed that way. See how many days until Black Friday for the other half of this story.