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You are so tired! I can tell because I’m tired too. In a couple of days, tens of millions of Americans will get on planes or trains or highways, crunching our limbs in godless ways for hours on end, worrying if we left the stove on or packed enough layers. We will fight the crowds, brave the chaos, pay the money. And then we will get to wherever we’re going, and we’ll eat. It will probably be lovely, or maybe it will be bad, but either way, it will be a little nuts because we will then (then!), in less than the time it takes a carton of half-and-half to go bad, do it all again.
Or at least many of us, those who are gluttons for punishment, will. We’ll move our bodies and our belongings around the country during precisely the time of year when the climate becomes, in many places, dark, wet, icy, and freezing—again. We’ll contemplate togetherness, and family, and potatoes—again. Maybe we’ll watch football—again. Many of us will eat turkey—again. We’ll pack all our traveling and relative-wrangling and big-mealing into one overstuffed, exhausting month, and for no extrinsic reason.
There’s a better way to do things, and in fact another country already does it. That country is Canada, and it celebrates Thanksgiving in October. We should too.
Canadian Thanksgiving is the second Monday of October, though many people observe it over the weekend. To preserve some tradition, I propose we reschedule ours to fall on the Thursday before Canada’s holiday. Superfans of the calendar may notice that this is the same long weekend as Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Columbus Day, which seems fine—they’d each have their own days, and besides, you can probably appreciate that there’s some thematic overlap here. So we’d have Thanksgiving Thursday and another holiday Monday, creating one mega-long weekend, and then roll gently into Halloween. After that, we’d have a whole month to avoid interstate travel and its attendant costs, spiritual and financial. We’d get our blood sugar in order before the holiday-party season begins in earnest.
Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations can easily commingle if we want them to—a squash is a squash—and we’d get to celebrate the bounty of the harvest during the actual harvest. In the parts of the country where the leaves turn, they would be beautiful. Everywhere, it would be a little warmer, a little easier to schlep around. We’d let the holiday season stretch out long and easy, making time for Thanksgiving on its own terms, rather than treating it like the dress rehearsal for Christmas. We could still eat the same stuff, still have a parade, and still, I’m sure, go shopping the next day. The only difference is the timing, which will now have been made rational.
We tend to think of Thanksgiving as something fixed—part of our national topography, like Mount Rushmore. A major feature of holidays is, after all, that they are pretty much the same every year. But another major feature is that they are social constructs, and Thanksgiving has been changing basically since it was invented. The first Thanksgiving—the one many of us learned about in school, the one with the Pilgrims—is believed by historians to have taken place sometime between September and November, and aside from being a meal, it had almost nothing to do with our modern celebration.
In 1789, George Washington and the first Congress did declare Thursday, November 26, a “Day of public Thanksgiving,” but this wasn’t enshrined anywhere in perpetuity: For decades, the holiday was just observed ad hoc by individual governments and families when events warranted giving thanks, which meant not necessarily in the same way, or on the same day, or even in same month, or at all. Not until the 19th century did the Thanksgiving we now know come to be, in part because Sarah Hale, the editor of an influential women’s magazine, decided America needed a holiday that honored the domestic sphere—that is, the topics her magazine covered—and celebrated Protestant values. For years, she “badgered” the government about this, according to the historian Anne Blue Wills, and in 1863, Abraham Lincoln, hoping to unite the nation while war cleaved it apart, acquiesced: Thanksgiving was now a federal holiday, celebrated permanently on the last Thursday of November.
Not that permanently, though, because 76 years later, we moved it. In 1939, Thanksgiving fell on the last day of the month, and retailers worried that a late start to the Christmas-shopping season would depress sales. Fred Lazarus Jr., the chairman of the company that would later become Macy’s, lobbied President Franklin D. Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving a week earlier, to the second-to-last Thursday of the month. Lazarus was successful, though the whole thing did not go over super well. Football coaches were enraged, having seen their big-ticket games suddenly moved from a major holiday to a random Thursday. A political rival of Roosevelt’s accused him of acting with “the omnipotence of Hitler.” The Three Stooges mocked the change in a short film. Only 23 of the 48 states honored the new date, and until 1941 we had two Thanksgivings, a week apart. Finally, Congress passed a resolution declaring Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of November, where it has remained ever since.
My point is that we as a society are pretty resilient. I think we can handle changing Thanksgiving again. It seems unlikely that retailers will mind much, and I’m sure that if given enough notice, the football coaches can prepare. And Thanksgiving, as many Americans’ favorite secular celebration, deserves better. At its best, the holiday welcomes people regardless of religion or relationship status, and it doesn’t even require them to bring a gift. It pulls us together with the people we love and honors one of the highest art forms of human existence: gratitude, though on Thanksgiving the more apt word is the one Buddhists use—katannuta, “to have a sense of what was done.”
Thanksgiving has changed along with the country. We started celebrating it in November because of, “basically, one woman’s understanding of the national calendar,” as Wills told me, and then we moved it because some guy named Fred asked the president to. We have made and remade it to serve the needs of nationalism, business, politics. What’s stopping us from remaking it again?
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