To all of our customers and partners, Rytech wishes you love and happiness as you spend the holidays with your friends and family.
As Rytech works hard for a return to normalcy in the wake of Hurricane Ian, we particularly want the victims of this tragic storm to know they are in our thoughts and prayers.
We thought everyone might appreciate a brief legislative history of America’s Thanksgiving Holiday, courtesy of the U.S House of Representative.
The Thanksgiving Holiday
On November 28, 1940,Representative Allen Treadway of Massachusetts made a plea on the House Floor for Congress to set the last Thursday of November as the legal holiday for Thanksgiving. But there was a whole lot more to it dating back to the 1700’s.
On Thursday, November 26, 1789, President George Washington issued a proclamation for “a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” Later, beginning in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln encouraged Americans to recognize the last Thursday of November as “a day of Thanksgiving.”
Then in 1870, Congress followed suit by passing legislation making Thanksgiving (along with Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, and Independence Day) a national holiday.
However, unlike the other holidays in the bill, the President was given the discretion to set the date for Thanksgiving. With few exceptions, each President until Franklin D. Roosevelt followed Lincoln’s lead by declaring the last Thursday of November a National Day of Thanks.
But President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the third Thursday of November to extend the Christmas shopping season to help businesses still suffering from the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Despite widespread criticism, the President moved Thanksgiving earlier again in 1940. Some Members expressed frustration on the House Floor. “I feel the example which Massachusetts and New England offer in the retention of longstanding custom should be given very careful consideration before ruthlessly permitting it to be sacrificed for mercenary considerations,” Treadway remarked.
On January 3, 1941, Representative Earl Michener of Michigan introduced House Joint Resolution 41 to set the last Thursday of November for the Thanksgiving holiday. “The rather universal sentiment seems to be that we should return to the old custom of the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day,” said Joseph O’Hara of Minnesota, since “not only [does it honor] a custom as old as our national history but it will mean a restoring of order to what has been confusion to many who have to deal with this problem as a holiday season.”
The House eventually passed Michener’s bill on October 6, 1941, and President Roosevelt signed it into law late that December, to take effect the following year.
Source: U.S. House of Representatives.
