In the United States, Thanksgiving Day is an annual day of thanks for the blessings of the past year. It is observed on the fourth Thursday in November in each of the states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. It is a historical, national and religious holiday with origins that date back with the Pilgrims. After the survival of their first colony through a bitter winter and the subsequent gathering of the harvest in the autumn of 1621, Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford issued a thanksgiving proclamation. During the three-day October thanksgiving the Pilgrims feasted on wild turkey and venison with their Native American guests.

Days of Thanksgiving were celebrated in America sporadically until, on November 26, 1789, President Washington issued a general proclamation calling for a nationwide day of thanksgiving for the establishment of the government under the Constitution. He made it clear that the day should be one of prayer and giving thanks to God, to be celebrated by all religious denominations.

Credit for establishing this day as a national holiday is usually given to Sarah J. Hale, editor and founder of the Ladies’ Magazine in Boston. Her editorials in the magazine and letters to President Lincoln urging the formal establishment of a national holiday of Thanksgiving resulted in Lincoln’s proclamation in 1863, which designated the last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day. Later presidents followed this example, with the exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1939 proclaimed Thanksgiving Day a week earlier–on the fourth, not the last, Thursday of November–in effort to encourage more holiday shopping. In 1941 Congress adopted a joint resolution, permanently setting the date of Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November.

Born on November 25