The Thanksgiving holiday’s history in North America is rooted in English traditions dating from the Protestant Reformation in the early 1500s. It includes the harvest festival in New England that occurs well before the late-November date on which the modern Thanksgiving holiday is celebrated.
Pilgrims and Puritans who emigrated from England in the 1620s and 1630s, carried the tradition of Days of Fasting and Days of Thanksgiving with them to New England. The modern Thanksgiving holiday tradition is a well-recorded 1619 event in Virginia and a sparsely documented 1621 celebration at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The 1621 Plymouth feast and thanksgiving were prompted by a good harvest, which the Pilgrims celebrated with Native Americans, who helped them get through the previous winter by giving them food during that time of scarcity.
Thanksgiving proclamations were made mostly by church leaders in New England until 1682, and then by both state and church leaders through the American Revolution. Our first President George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide thanksgiving celebration in America marking November 26, 1789 as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.
Since then, Thanksgiving in the United States has been observed on different dates. The final Thursday in November had become the customary date in most U.S. states by the beginning of the 19th century. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a presidential proclamation changing the holiday to the next to last Thursday in November for business reasons. However in 1941, he signed a joint resolution of Congress changing the national Thanksgiving Day back to the fourth Thursday in November.
The “Holiday Season” generally begins with Thanksgiving. Currently, the first day after Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, marks the start of the Christmas shopping season followed by Cyber Monday for the online shoppers. Enjoy for the holidays! Article courtesy of Wikipedia.