Today, the United States officially marks Thanksgiving. This holiday with vague roots in centuries-old European harvest festivals has had peculiarly American – and highly problematic – iconography and mythology constructed around it since the mid-19th century. In its modern incarnation, Thanksgiving is also inescapably associated with capitalism.
In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed the date of the celebration from the last Thursday in November (a precedent established when President Abraham Lincoln first made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863), to the second-to-last Thursday in the month.
Interestingly enough, even Roosevelt, whose economic policies were more progressive than those of any other US president, justified the decision in terms of creating a longer Christmas shopping season for the benefit of retailers. In 1942, the holiday was officially set where it remains now: in the fourth week of November, regardless of whether the month contains four or five Thursdays.
