I refer to this from time-to-time when people complain about Christmas starting earlier each year. In fact, it’s been going on for at least 80 years. Just as SNL has never been as funny as it used to be, Christmas shopping season has always started earlier than it used to.
From the FDR library, The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings.
People tend to act like each year’s Christmas shopping season is the Worst One Yet, with America eternally in danger of dropping off a cliff into Total Commercialism. It’s an easy news story to write I guess. Pretend that this year it’s really bad and ignore that you wrote the same thing last year, but in fact it’s always been the case that Thanksgiving signaled the start of the Christmas shopping season, and stores have always tried to move that date up earlier in the year. From the FDR Presidential Library’s website, The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings:
At the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, Thanksgiving was not a fixed holiday; it was up to the President to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation to announce what date the holiday would fall on. However, Thanksgiving was always the last Thursday in November because that was the day President Abraham Lincoln observed the holiday when he declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. Franklin Roosevelt continued that tradition, but he soon found that tradition was difficult to keep in extreme circumstances such as the Great Depression. His first Thanksgiving in office, 1933, fell on November 30th, the last day of the month, because November had five Thursdays that year. Since statistics showed that most people did not do their Christmas shopping until after Thanksgiving, business leaders feared they would lose money, especially during the Depression, because there were only 24 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They asked Franklin Roosevelt to make Thanksgiving one week earlier. President Roosevelt ignored those concerns in 1933, but when Thanksgiving once again threatened to fall on the last day of November in 1939, FDR reconsidered the request and moved the date of Thanksgiving up one week. Thanksgiving 1939 would be held, President Roosevelt proclaimed, on November 23rd and not November 30th.
More stuff, including scans of primary sources, in the link.
Waiting for the elevator today to take me upstairs to buy stamps for my rent check, a random lady asked if I was getting ready to stuff myself on “Turkey Day.” I hesitated for a second before just saying, “yeah.” Then I realized that I had found the statement mildly offensive, and then I realized that that’s a ridiculous thing for me to find offensive. For one, it’s obviously my decision not to eat meat, and besides the fact that I just think “Turkey Day” is a stupid-ass term, I still do “stuff myself” on Thanksgiving full of stuffing, cranberry sauce, potatoes, beans, rolls, pie, etc. Secondly, for some reason I was momentarily offended that the lady would assume that I celebrated Thanksgiving, before realizing that this was even stupider than being offended she wasn’t being vegeratian-sensitive. When did I become such a wuss?