In the US, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday of November each year to celebrate the harvest and other blessings of the past year.
It is said that in 1621, the English settlers in Plymouth (US) had an especially good harvest and since the Wampanoag people (Native American) had taught them many skills and helped them, the settlers wanted to thank them with a rich feast.
While this feast didn’t start the trend of Thanksgiving, some communities continued to hold similar ceremonies over the next years.
The dates of these ceremonies were decided by the Church leaders, who preferred Thursdays for reasons not explained fully, but apparently because Thursdays didn’t interfere with Church services.
Then, US President George Washington declared Thursday, 26 November 1789 as the “Day of Publick Thanksgivin”.
But it was never a holiday until Abraham Lincoln in 1863 announced that all states should celebrate Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November.
It became known as the starting day of the shopping season that lasted till the end of Christmas (it was considered bad for retailers to display Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving).
But in 1939 (end of the economically troubled decade), November had 5 Thursdays and the last Thursday fell on 30th Nov.
The merchants complained to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt that this left only 24 day-period for Christmas shopping, which would cause bankruptcies, so FDR changed the date to 23rd November, causing huge confusion, as people had already made plans.
The same thing happened in 1940 and eventually in 1941, the US Congress passed a bill that made the fourth Thursday in November the Thanksgiving.
Now, there is a college football rivalry game in America called the Army-Navy Game that dates back to 1890 and for a long time, it was played on the Saturday following the Thanksgiving Thursday.
By the 1950s, people still in their Thanksgiving mood, craving to catch the Army-Navy game and to enjoy a 4-day weekend increasingly started calling sick on the Friday following the Thanksgiving and so, many businesses made this day an additional paid holiday.
This led to shoppers and tourists flooding the city, creating chaos with traffic jams, accidents, and shop-lifting, leading to the Philadelphia (where Army-Navy games mostly happened) police to coin the term Black Friday.
But because ‘Black’ Friday was originally associated with 24 September 1869, when the stock market had crashed by 20%, the merchants tried changing the Friday following Thanksgiving Day to ‘Big’ Friday but they never succeeded.
