Thanksgiving as a federal holiday
The Thanksgiving holiday, which is mostly celebrated by Pilgrims, turkeys, Black Friday, and football, is not typically linked with Abraham Lincoln. But through a presidential proclamation issued in October 1863, President Lincoln was the one who originally declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. Lincoln declared a national holiday that year, suspending all daily activities on the last Thursday in November "as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise." No national Thanksgiving holiday had been observed until Lincoln's proclamation.
Sometimes November has five Thursdays. In those situations, the Christmas season was impacted by Thanksgiving celebrations on the final Thursday of November. Thanksgiving was seen as the start of the holiday season and shopping by the 1930s. The holiday was shifted to the fourth Thursday of the month in 1939 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt because the last Thursday in November fell on November 30.
He was able to do this because Congress left it up to the President's discretion to choose the date in his yearly proclamation when it declared Thanksgiving a permanent national holiday in 1870. Congress stepped in in 1941 after certain Roosevelt-hating states decided to disregard the President and observe the holiday on the final Thursday. Thanksgiving, first observed nationally by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and then again in 1864, became a statutory holiday after Congress approved legislation establishing it as the fourth Thursday in November. FDR signed the bill, and it became effective.
