What Is Thanksgiving? History, Date & 2026 Traditions (US & Canada)

What Is Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is an annual harvest festival observed principally in the United States and Canada, with smaller observances in Liberia, Grenada, Norfolk Island, and a handful of other places that share a historical or cultural tie. Despite the shared name and the shared centrepiece of a roast turkey, the two main versions of the festival have distinct origins, distinct dates, and distinct legal histories. What unites them is the underlying idea: a public, family-centred pause at the close of the autumn harvest, devoted to gratitude for the year's gathering of crops and the bonds of household and community.

In its modern form, Thanksgiving is overwhelmingly a civic and domestic occasion rather than a religious one. Households travel, sometimes substantial distances, to gather around a single table; the meal is large, conventionally anchored on roast turkey with stuffing, potatoes, and seasonal pies; and the day is widely understood as a moment to articulate, however informally, what the past year has provided. In both countries, the holiday has accumulated a thick layer of secular ritual — parades, football, retail events — that sits comfortably alongside the older harvest meaning.

When Is Thanksgiving 2026?

In the United States, Thanksgiving 2026 falls on Thursday, 26 November 2026. The date is set in federal holiday law at 5 U.S.C. § 6103, which lists Thanksgiving Day as the fourth Thursday of November after the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Act reorganised several federal observances. In 2027, US Thanksgiving will fall on Thursday, 25 November 2027.

In Canada, Thanksgiving 2026 falls on Monday, 12 October 2026. The date is set by the parliamentary proclamation of 31 January 1957, which fixed the holiday on the second Monday of October. In 2027, Canadian Thanksgiving will fall on Monday, 11 October 2027. The Canadian date is roughly six weeks earlier than the American one, reflecting the earlier autumn harvest at higher latitudes.

The day after US Thanksgiving — Friday, 27 November 2026 — is Black Friday. It is not a federal public holiday in the United States, but in practice it functions as one: federal offices remain technically open, but a large share of private-sector employers grant the day off, and the combination of Thursday's holiday, Friday's de facto closure, and the weekend produces a four-day Thanksgiving weekend that is the longest non-Christmas leisure block in the American calendar. In Canada, the Monday placement of Thanksgiving produces a three-day weekend (Saturday, Sunday, Monday) without any equivalent retail anchor.

The History of US Thanksgiving

The conventional origin story of American Thanksgiving traces to a three-day harvest festival held at Plymouth Colony in 1621, attended by roughly fifty Pilgrim settlers who had survived their first winter in New England and approximately ninety members of the Wampanoag confederacy under the sachem Massasoit. The settlers themselves did not call the gathering "Thanksgiving" — in seventeenth-century Puritan usage that term denoted a solemn day of religious fasting and prayer, not a feast — and the surviving primary sources describe it simply as a time of communal eating, target shooting, and games. The narrative now associated with the event was largely shaped by nineteenth-century writers seeking a national origin myth.

Days of formal thanksgiving were nonetheless declared throughout the colonial and early federal period, usually in response to military victories or good harvests. George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation as president in 1789, designating Thursday, 26 November of that year as a day of public thanksgiving for the new federal Constitution. Subsequent presidents declared Thanksgivings irregularly, and individual states set their own dates throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.

The transformation into an annual federal holiday is largely the work of one woman. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the influential Godey's Lady's Book, campaigned for nearly two decades — through editorials and a long correspondence with successive presidents — for a uniform national Thanksgiving. She finally succeeded in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln, in the depths of the Civil War, issued a proclamation preserved by the National Archives establishing the last Thursday of November as a recurring national day of thanksgiving. The 1863 proclamation set the modern American holiday.

The date shifted once more in the twentieth century. In 1939, with the Great Depression still depressing retail sales, Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving forward by one week, from the last Thursday of November to the second-to-last Thursday, in order to lengthen the Christmas shopping season. The decision provoked a partisan backlash; opponents derided the new date as "Franksgiving," twenty-two states refused to follow the change, and for two years the country effectively observed two competing Thanksgivings. Congress resolved the dispute with a federal law in 1941 that fixed Thanksgiving permanently on the fourth Thursday of November — a compromise that preserved most of Roosevelt's commercial calendar while restoring uniformity.

The History of Canadian Thanksgiving

Canadian Thanksgiving has a deeper and more contested origin. The earliest claimed celebration on Canadian soil predates Plymouth by forty-three years: in 1578, the English explorer Martin Frobisher, having survived a stormy Atlantic crossing on his third voyage in search of the Northwest Passage, held a formal service of thanks for safe arrival in what is now Nunavut. The chaplain Robert Wolfall preached, and Frobisher's men ate a meal of salt beef, biscuits, and peas — a sparse feast, but a documented act of public thanksgiving on North American ground decades before the Pilgrims sailed.

French settlers in New France also held harvest celebrations from the early seventeenth century onward, and the diaries of Samuel de Champlain record communal feasts of thanks at Port-Royal as early as 1606. After the British conquest of New France and the subsequent arrival of United Empire Loyalists following the American Revolution, the New England tradition of an autumn harvest thanksgiving was carried northward and grafted onto these older Canadian observances.

Through the nineteenth century, Canadian Thanksgiving floated across the calendar. The first Dominion-wide observance under the post-Confederation government was held in 1879, but the date moved repeatedly between April, October, and November, sometimes combined with Armistice Day after the First World War. Parliament finally settled the matter on 31 January 1957, fixing Thanksgiving permanently on the second Monday of October by proclamation: "A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed." The earlier date, six weeks ahead of the American holiday, simply reflects the agricultural reality that Canadian harvests come in earlier under shorter, cooler northern growing seasons.

The Differences Between US and Canadian Thanksgiving

Despite the shared name, the two holidays differ on almost every practical dimension.

The most consequential differences are the date itself, the length of the resulting break, and the commercial scale that has accumulated around the American version. Canadian Thanksgiving remains primarily a domestic occasion; American Thanksgiving has become the opening weekend of the entire Christmas retail and travel cycle.

Thanksgiving Foods

In both countries, the centrepiece of the meal is a roast turkey. Survey data from the National Turkey Federation suggests that roughly 88 per cent of Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and the proportion in Canada is broadly similar. The bird is typically roasted whole, stuffed or accompanied by stuffing (the term used in the United States) or dressing (the term preferred in much of the South when the mixture is baked separately), and served with gravy made from the pan drippings.

Regional variation is most visible in the stuffing itself. The American South favours cornbread stuffing, often with sausage and pecans; the Northeast retains a tradition of oyster stuffing, a relic of the colonial Atlantic seaboard; the Canadian Prairies introduce wild rice and dried fruit; and in Quebec, French-Canadian households often serve tourtière, a spiced pork pie, alongside or in place of turkey. Cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and gravy appear nearly universally. Sweet-potato or yam casserole, often topped with marshmallows, is a distinctively American addition; the green bean casserole that now appears on tens of millions of US tables was invented as a recipe by Campbell's Soup Company in 1955 to promote canned mushroom soup.

Desserts are equally codified. Pumpkin pie appears on the great majority of US Thanksgiving tables and on most Canadian ones; pecan pie is a Southern American addition; and Canadian households often supplement the spread with butter tarts, Nanaimo bars, and other regional sweets. Side dishes ranging from succotash and candied carrots to dinner rolls fill out a meal that is, by design, considerably larger than any other family dinner of the year.

Thanksgiving Traditions

A dense layer of secular ritual has built up around the American holiday in particular. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, held in New York City since 1924, runs from the Upper West Side down to Macy's Herald Square store and is watched in person by roughly three and a half million people and on television by tens of millions more. Its giant inflatable balloons, marching bands, and closing appearance by Santa Claus function as the unofficial start of the American Christmas season. NFL Thanksgiving Day games, played continuously since 1934, traditionally feature the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys at home, with a third evening game added to the schedule since 2006. Canada's CFL Thanksgiving Day Classic plays an equivalent role on the second Monday of October, though at a smaller scale.

The presidential turkey pardon, in which the sitting US president formally spares one or two turkeys from the table at a White House ceremony, was formalised in 1989 under George H.W. Bush, although informal precedents date back to the Truman administration; the pardoned birds retire to a farm. The post-2010 phenomenon of "Friendsgiving" — a separate Thanksgiving meal held among friends, typically on the weekend before or after the main holiday — has become a significant secondary tradition, particularly among younger urban Americans.

Thanksgiving travel is historically the busiest period in the US transport calendar. The Transportation Security Administration routinely screens record numbers of passengers in the days surrounding the holiday, and the Wednesday before is consistently among the highest single travel days of any year. Once Thursday is over, the four-day weekend opens onto the retail calendar. Black Friday (the Friday after) is the largest single shopping day of the American year by foot-traffic, and Cyber Monday — coined in 2005 — has become the largest online retail day. Both events have spread well beyond the United States, with major Black Friday sales now run by retailers across Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and much of Latin America.

Thanksgiving Around the World

Thanksgiving is more widely observed than its American and Canadian footprints suggest, although the form varies significantly.

Liberia, founded by freed African-Americans in the 1820s, observes its own Thanksgiving Day on the first Thursday of November as a direct legacy of that American settlement. The food differs — roast chicken, cassava, and spicy greens are common — but the harvest framing is the same.

Germany marks Erntedankfest, the Harvest Thanksgiving Festival, on the first Sunday of October. It is more religious and more rural than the American holiday: a Christian harvest service, often led by Catholic or Protestant clergy, with churches decorated by parishioners using sheaves of grain, fruit, and vegetables. It is not a public holiday at federal level but is widely observed in churches and villages.

Japan observes Kinrō Kansha no Hi, or Labour Thanksgiving Day, on 23 November. It descends from the ancient imperial harvest ritual of Niinamesai, in which the Emperor offered the year's first rice to the kami, but in its modern form — codified after the Second World War in 1948 — it primarily honours the contribution of workers and the value of production.

Grenada observes Thanksgiving Day on 25 October. The date commemorates the 1983 US-led invasion that ended the Marxist coup against the People's Revolutionary Government and is unique to the island.

Norfolk Island, an external territory of Australia, observes a Thanksgiving Day in late November. The custom was introduced in the 1890s by visiting American whalers and has been retained ever since.

Public Holiday Observance

In the United States, Thanksgiving has been a federal holiday continuously since Lincoln's 1863 proclamation, codified by federal law in 1941. Federal offices, banks, the US Postal Service, the New York Stock Exchange, and Nasdaq are all closed on Thanksgiving Day; equity markets close early on the Friday. Most retailers historically closed on Thanksgiving itself but reopened in the small hours of Black Friday. Since around 2014, however, the trend has reversed: a growing list of major retailers — including Costco, IKEA, Nordstrom, and REI — now publicly close their stores on Thanksgiving Day as a marketing position, with REI's "#OptOutside" campaign the best-known example. Public schools close from Thursday through Friday, and many extend the closure across the full week.

In Canada, Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday in most provinces and territories. The exceptions are New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador, where the day is optional rather than statutory and observance varies by employer. In the observing provinces, banks, federal offices, provincial government offices, schools, liquor stores, and most non-essential retail close on the Monday; some grocery stores and many restaurants remain open.

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Key Facts

Sources

1. National Archives, Thanksgiving records and Lincoln's 1863 proclamation — https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/thanksgiving
2. Public Law 90-363, Uniform Monday Holiday Act — https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Public_Law_90-363
3. 5 U.S.C. § 6103, Holidays — https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/6103
4. Government of Canada, Thanksgiving Day proclamation history — https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/important-commemorative-days/thanksgiving.html