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Roosevelt Thanksgiving

Posted by Brian from Shawnee on November 21, 2007

In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to help the country out of the Great Depression by extending the Christmas shopping season by an extra week. To accomplish this, he simply moved Thanksgiving back a week, to the 3rd Thursday in November. Well, it was Congress that actually passed the law, but the idea was referred to as "Roosevelt Thanksgiving". The country only observed Thanksgiving on that day for three years, from 1939-1941, but several states still stuck to it into the mid 40's. My father told of being demobilized after World War II and being given turkey sandwiches at a train station in Tennessee in mid-November, because they still observed "Roosevelt Thanksgiving".

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