Why do Americans celebrate Thanksgiving?

Americans celebrate Thanksgiving to give thanks for the blessings of the past year. The holiday traces its modern form to a presidential proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln on October 3, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, which set apart the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. Lincoln, drafting through Secretary of State William Seward, was responding partly to a long campaign by Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey's Lady's Book, who had advocated a national thanksgiving day for nearly two decades. Lincoln issued the proclamation just over two months after the Union victory at Gettysburg, and it framed gratitude as an act of national unity at a moment of bitter division.

Federal observance was made permanent and standardized as the fourth Thursday in November by Public Law 77-379, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed on December 26, 1941, after years of confusion caused by his attempts to move the holiday earlier in the calendar. The holiday's colonial reference point is a three-day harvest feast held in Plymouth Colony in autumn 1621, attended by approximately 50 surviving Pilgrims and about 90 Wampanoag people under the leadership of Massasoit. The 1621 feast included venison, fowl (probably wild turkey, ducks, or geese), corn, squash, and seafood, and is described in a 1622 letter by Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow. It was not called Thanksgiving by the participants and was not repeated annually.

The Continental Congress and various early presidents proclaimed days of thanksgiving on a one-time basis, including George Washington's November 26, 1789 national thanksgiving for the new Constitution. The deeper meaning of the holiday is gratitude: thanks for the harvest, for family, for safety, for prosperity, and historically for protection against war and disease. The holiday is religious in origin (Lincoln's 1863 proclamation explicitly invoked God), but it is observed across faiths and by secular Americans alike.

Common observances include a large family meal centered on roast turkey, the watching of NFL football and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, public service activities such as volunteering at food banks, and the presidential turkey pardoning ceremony at the White House. It is sometimes called the most American holiday because it is shared widely across regional, ethnic, and religious lines and is not tied to a particular faith or political tradition.