🇺🇸 ThanksgivingTurkey Day

Thanksgiving falls on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States — a date fixed by Congress in 1941, ending decades of state-by-state variation. Its origins blend a 1621 harvest meal between Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag with the longer Anglo-Christian tradition of public days of thanksgiving; Abraham Lincoln's 1863 proclamation, issued during the Civil War, established the modern annual holiday at the federal level.

The centrepiece is a long midday-to-evening meal anchored by roast turkey and a familiar rotation of sides — stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet-potato casserole, green-bean casserole, and pumpkin pie. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York and the all-day NFL slate (Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys hosting since the 1960s) are near-universal television fixtures.

For most US workers Thanksgiving is functionally a four-day weekend: federal employees get Thursday off, and the vast majority of private employers close Friday as well even though it isn't a federal holiday. The day after Thanksgiving — Black Friday — is the unofficial start of the holiday-shopping season, though the door-busting in-store theatre of the 2000s has migrated almost entirely online.

It is by a wide margin the heaviest US travel period of the year. The Sunday after Thanksgiving is consistently the single busiest day at TSA checkpoints, beating any summer or December date. Roads, airports, and Amtrak corridors all peak on Wednesday afternoon and Sunday afternoon. Most Americans travel by car (~50 million per AAA estimates) and 5–6 million fly.

For PTO planners Thanksgiving is one of the most efficient bridge windows of the year: take Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before, or Monday and Tuesday after, and you stretch the four-day weekend into a 9-day break — exactly the configuration that makes Thanksgiving week the busiest leave-request approval queue at most American HR departments.