Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November (which became the uniform date country-wide in 1941). The earliest Thanksgiving can occur is November 22; the latest is November 28. Outside the United States, it is called American Thanksgiving to distinguish it from the Canadian holiday of the same name and related celebrations in other regions. As the name implies, the holiday generally revolves around giving thanks and the centerpiece of most celebrations is a Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends.
The modern national celebration dates to 1863; prior to this, it was a regional holiday, whose origins lie in the 17th and 18th century days of thanksgiving of Calvinist New England. The evolution of the holiday was not linear (various New England communities had independently developed their own similar traditions that slowly turned into a singular annual Thanksgiving Day); the first known civil day of thanksgiving in the New England tradition was declared at Plymouth Colony in 1623, The fast and thanksgiving days of New England by William DeLoss Love, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Cambridge, 1895 two years after the famous 1621 harvest celebration popularized as the "first Thanksgiving" bearing a substantial, if a coincidental, similarity to what Thanksgiving Day would eventually become. Celebrations of Thanksgiving for the harvest in New England became a regular occurrence by the 1660s.
Thanksgiving dinner often consists of foods associated with New England harvest celebrations: turkey, potatoes (usually mashed and sweet), squash, corn (maize), green beans, cranberries (typically as cranberry sauce), and pumpkin pie. It has expanded over the years to include specialties from other regions of the United States, such as macaroni and cheese and pecan pie in the South and wild rice stuffing in the Great Lakes region, as well as international and ethnic dishes.
Other Thanksgiving customs include charitable organizations offering Thanksgiving dinner for the poor, attending religious services, and watching or participating in parades and American football games. Thanksgiving is also typically regarded as the beginning of the holiday shopping season, with the day after, Black Friday, often considered to be the busiest retail shopping day of the year in the United States. Cyber Monday, the online equivalent, is held on the Monday following Thanksgiving.
History Days of thanksgiving
Days of thanksgiving, days attributed to giving thanks to deities, have existed for thousands of years and long predate the European colonization of North America. The first recorded "Thanksgiving" in North America occurred in 1578 in Nunavut, held by Sir Martin Frobisher and his crew.
Documented thanksgiving services in what is currently the United States were conducted as early as the 16th century by the Spaniards (Archived Link added on 27 November 2025) and the French. These days of thanksgiving were celebrated through church services and feasting. Historian Michael Gannon claimed St. Augustine, Florida, was founded with a shared thanksgiving meal on September 8, 1565. The thanksgiving at St. Augustine was celebrated 56 years before the Puritan Pilgrim thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony (in what is now Massachusetts), but it did not become the origin of the national annual tradition.
Thanksgiving services were routine in what became the Commonwealth of Virginia as early as 1607; the first permanent settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, held a thanksgiving in 1610. On December 4, 1619, 38 English settlers celebrated a thanksgiving immediately upon landing at Berkeley Hundred, Charles City. The group's London Company charter specifically required "that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God". This celebration has, since the mid 20th century, been commemorated there annually at present-day Berkeley Plantation, the ancestral home of the Harrison family of Virginia.
Harvest festival observed by the Pilgrims at Plymouth
The Plymouth colonists, today known as Pilgrims, had settled in a part of eastern Massachusetts formerly occupied by the Patuxet Indians who had died in a devastating epidemic between 1614 and 1620. After the harsh winter of 1620–1621 killed half of the Plymouth colonists, two Native intermediaries, Samoset and Tisquantum (more commonly known by the diminutive variant Squanto, and the last living member of the Patuxet) came in at the request of Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag, to negotiate a peace treaty and establish trade relations with the colonists, as both men had some knowledge of English from previous interactions with Europeans, through both trade (Samoset) and a period of enslavement (Squanto).
Massasoit had hoped to establish a mutual protection alliance between the Wampanoag, themselves greatly weakened by the same plague that extirpated the Patuxet, and the better-armed English in their long-running rivalry with the Narragansett, who had largely been spared from the epidemic; the Wampanoag reasoned that, given that the Pilgrims had brought women and children, they had not arrived to wage war against them.
Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to catch eel and grow corn and served as an interpreter for them until he too succumbed to disease a year later. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit also gave food to the colonists when supplies brought from England proved insufficient.
Having brought in a good harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated at Plymouth for three days in the autumn of 1621. The exact time is unknown, but James Baker, a former Plimoth Plantation vice president of research, stated in 1996, "The event occurred between Sept. 21 and Nov. 11, 1621, with the most likely time being around Michaelmas (Sept. 29), the traditional time." Seventeenth-century accounts do not identify this as a day of thanksgiving but rather as a harvest celebration.
The Pilgrim feast was cooked by the four adult Pilgrim women who survived their first winter in the New World (Eleanor Billington, Elizabeth Hopkins, Mary Brewster, and Susanna White), along with young daughters and male and female servants.
According to accounts by Wampanoag descendants, the harvest feast was originally set up for the Pilgrims alone (contrary to the common misconception that the Wampanoag were invited for their help in teaching the pilgrims their agricultural techniques). Part of the harvest celebration involved a demonstration of arms by the colonists, and the Wampanoag, having entered into a mutual protection agreement with the colonists and likely mistaking the celebratory gunfire for an attack by a common enemy, arrived fully armed. The Wampanoag were welcomed to join the celebration, as their farming and hunting techniques had produced much of the bounty for the Pilgrims, and contributed their own foods to the meal.
Most modern imaginings of the celebration promote the idea that every party involved ate solely turkey. However, "while the celebrants might well have feasted on wild turkey, the local diet also included fish, eels, shellfish, and a Wampanoag dish called nasaump, which the Pilgrims had adopted: boiled cornmeal mixed with vegetables and meats. There were no potatoes (an indigenous South American food not yet introduced into the global food system) and no pies (because there was no butter, wheat flour, or sugar)."
Two colonists gave personal accounts of the 1621 feast in Plymouth. William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote:
Edward Winslow, in Mourt's Relation wrote:
New England Thanksgivings Baker's "New England Thanksgiving" does not refer to an annual commemoration of the Pilgrims' 1621 harvest celebration. In fact, that event had largely been forgotten for over a century. Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation" was not published until the 1850s and the booklet "Mourt's Relation" was typically summarized by other publications without the now-familiar thanksgiving story. By the eighteenth century, the original booklet appeared to be lost or forgotten although a copy was later rediscovered in Philadelphia in 1820, with the first full reprinting in 1841. In that reprinting, in a footnote, the editor, Alexander Young, was the first person to describe the 1621 feast as the "first Thanksgiving", but this was only because he viewed it as similar to the traditions of New England Thanksgivings that had developed independently from it over the previous two hundred years.
Those traditions, and the modern holiday, were born out of the gradual homogenization and, to a degree, secularization, of multiple, separate but related days of thanksgiving throughout New England. These days were often celebrated from early November to early to mid-December, in some cases functioning almost as a Calvinist alternative to Christmas, and typically involving a return to the family home, church services, a large meal and various diversions ranging from games and sports to formal balls. These celebrations were gradually disseminated throughout the US as New Englanders spread across the country, and into Canada after Loyalist New Englanders settled there following the American Revolutionary War; this process accelerated after the Civil War.
Sarah Hale and Godey's Lady's Book Sarah Josepha Hale, a native of New Hampshire and steeped in the traditions of a New England Thanksgiving, was the longtime editor of Godey's Lady's Book, the most widely circulated periodical in the antebellum U.S. Hale was the chief promoter of the modern idea of the holiday in the 19th century, from the foods served to the decorations to the role of women in putting it all together. Concerned by increasing factionalism in American society, Hale envisioned Thanksgiving as a commonly-celebrated, patriotic holiday that would unite Americans in purpose and values. She viewed those values as rooted in domesticity and rural simplicity over urban sophistication. As a celebration of hearth and home, she also sought to cement a role for women within the identity of the young nation.
Every November, Hale would focus her monthly magazine column on Thanksgiving, positioning the celebration as a pious, patriotic holiday that lived on in the memory as a check against temptation, or as a comfort in times of trial. Hale and Godey's led the way in creating a standardized celebration, which in turn created a standardized celebrant — a standardized and true American.
Her vision aimed at a broad audience: the stories in Godey's depicted Black servants, Roman Catholics, and Southerners celebrating Thanksgiving, and becoming more American (which for Hale meant becoming more like White Protestant Northerners) by doing so.
Her efforts sought to expand the holiday from a regional celebration to a national one not only through advocacy in her magazine but also in direct appeals to several U.S. presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, who began annual national proclamations of autumn Thanksgivings in 1863.
Enter the Pilgrims While the Pilgrims' story did not itself create the modern Thanksgiving holiday, it did become inextricably linked with it in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was largely due to the introduction in U.S. schools of "an annual sequence of classroom holiday activities through which civic education and American patriotism were indoctrinated."