when did thanksgiving become a national holiday?

Thanksgiving in the United States became an official recurring national holiday in the 1860s, and its date was firmly set in law in 1941.

Quick Scoop

• In 1789, President George Washington proclaimed Thursday, November 26, 1789, as a one-time national “day of public thanksgiving and prayer,” the first national Thanksgiving under the U.S. Constitution.

• In the mid-1800s, writer Sarah Josepha Hale spent decades lobbying presidents and politicians to create a regular national Thanksgiving Day.

• In 1863, during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for a national Thanksgiving Day each year, effectively creating an annually observed national holiday (though still by presidential proclamation, not yet a fixed date in law).

• In 1870, Congress included Thanksgiving in a law establishing federal holidays in Washington, D.C., making it an officially recognized federal holiday, though the president still chose the exact date.

• In 1939–1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt experimented with moving Thanksgiving earlier in November to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, which caused confusion as different states followed different dates.

• On December 26, 1941, Roosevelt signed a joint resolution of Congress that set Thanksgiving as a national holiday on the fourth Thursday in November, a rule that still defines the federal holiday today.

In everyday terms: people celebrated Thanksgivings for centuries, but it became a standing, nationwide tradition under Lincoln in 1863 and was formally locked into the calendar by Congress and President Roosevelt in 1941.

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Discover when Thanksgiving became a national holiday, from Washington’s 1789 proclamation to Lincoln’s 1863 tradition and the 1941 law that fixed the modern date in the U.S.

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