When is thanksgiving 2017

The popular belief of Thanksgiving in the USA comes from the documented celebration at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts where the Pilgrims first settled when they first came to America. The Pilgrims and Puritans who started emigrating from England in the s and s carried their religious tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving to New England. In when the 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred in Charles City County, Virginia the day was noted as a day of remembrance and celebration and a day to thank God for the arrival of their ships safely in the harbor.

Thanksgiving also has significance in the American Revolution. Several proclamations were issued by royal governors like John Hancock, George Washington, and the Continental Congress giving thanks to God and the events that favoured them. George Washington when he became the President of the United States proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving in America on November 26, After a successful growing year and harvest, the Pilgrims were ready to give thanks by the fall of The Pilgrims celebrated a second Thanksgiving in , after surviving a long drought.

For more than years after those first celebrations, versions of Thanksgiving were celebrated on different days in the fall by the different colonies, and later, by different states.

The Continental Congress designated days of thanksgiving during the American Revolution. George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the young U. President Abraham Lincoln in , in the midst of the Civil War, proclaimed a national holiday of Thanksgiving for the last Thursday in November. Seasonal parades and busy football games can also cause disruption to local traffic. Thanksgiving Day has been an annual holiday in the United States since However, not everyone sees Thanksgiving Day as a cause for celebration.

American Indian Heritage Day is also observed at this time of the year. Another early event was held in in the Virginia Colony. Many people trace the origins of the modern Thanksgiving Day to the harvest celebration the Pilgrims held in Plymouth, Massachusetts in However, their first true thanksgiving was in , when they gave thanks for rain that ended a drought.

These early thanksgivings took the form of a special church service, rather than a feast. Some prefer it to Christmas because of less emphasis on consumerism. Thanksgiving, for most, is also a start of a four day weekend which is great, too. The rule of declaring the final Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day was followed until [6]. In President Franklin D.

Roosevelt declared the fourth next-to-last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving instead of the last, fifth one.