The first Thanksgiving Day is believed to have been celebrated in the early 1621s between the Mayflower pilgrims who founded the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts and the local Wampanoag tribe. While several announcements were made to celebrate Thanksgiving Day following that year, the exact dates were unknown.
In September 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation naming Thursday, November 26, 1789, as a "Day of Publick Thanksgiving". This was the first time Thanksgiving was celebrated under the new Constitution. However, the dates of the celebrations varied as subsequent presidents issued Thanksgiving proclamations.
It wasn't until President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Proclamation that Thanksgiving was regularly commemorated each year on the last Thursday of November.
However, in 1939, the last Thursday in November fell on the last day of the month. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about having less time for Christmas shopping, which could negatively affect the country's economic recovery. To address this issue, he made an official announcement (Presidential Proclamation) to change the date of Thanksgiving to the second-to-last Thursday of November. 32 states obeyed and issued similar proclamations, but 16 states refused and continued to celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.
To end this confusion, Congress decided to set a fixed date to celebrate the holiday. On October 06, 1941, the House passed a joint resolution declaring that the last Thursday be celebrated as Thanksgiving Day. The Senate amended the resolution to be the fourth Thursday, which would take into account only those years when November has 5 Thursdays. The House agreed to the amendment and President Roosevelt signed the resolution on December 26, 1941, thus establishing the fourth Thursday in November as the Federal Thanksgiving Day Holiday.
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