The Fourth Thursday

The Month the Dark Comes Early

By the second week of November the porch light comes on before supper. The sun has gone thin and amber, sliding low over the rooftops, and any warmth it manages is gone by the time the last leaves are raked. Frost writes its usual message on the car windows. The air in the driveway smells of damp leaves and, faintly, of wood smoke, which will be a fact of the evening for the next four months. The clocks have fallen back, and the dark arrives like a guest who plans to stay.

This is the month that tests the American theory that cold is a problem to be solved indoors. The garden is done. The grill is covered. The indoor season has begun, and its first holiday is the one that asks for nothing but a table, a house full of people, and the willingness to sit in the warmth while the neighborhood goes gray outside. Thanksgiving is November's hearth fire, and the month is built around it. The whole month leans toward that day the way a cold house leans toward the stove.

Thanksgiving is not an old holiday by American reckoning. The harvest feast the Pilgrims kept in 1621 was a three-day party in Plymouth, held sometime in the fall; no one was careful enough to record the date. The holiday as a yearly appointment came much later. But the month it landed in was never in doubt. November is the month of harvest and stockpiling, of putting the garden to bed and the woodpile up, of turning the year's plenty into meals. Whatever Thursday it happened to fall on, the holiday would be a November thing.

A Date That Wandered

For most of American history, the date wandered. George Washington set aside a day of national thanksgiving in 1789 and chose a Thursday — November 26, as it happened, the last Thursday of the month. But the genuine fixture arrived in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln named the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanks. Every president after him followed the custom, and a custom repeated for more than seventy years begins to feel like a law of nature. The last Thursday of November was Thanksgiving. It had always been. It would always be.

Then came 1939, when November had five Thursdays, and the last of them was November 30 — the latest Thanksgiving could possibly fall. The country's retailers looked at the space between Thanksgiving and Christmas, did the arithmetic on the shopping season, and went to Washington with the kind of request that sounds reasonable over lunch. Franklin Roosevelt agreed. The White House announced that Thanksgiving would come a week early, on the fourth Thursday.

The reaction was swift, loud, and entirely American. Some states said they would follow the President. Others announced they would keep the date they had always kept. A few, not wishing to choose, found ways to observe both. Newspapers chose sides. Calendars went to print with two possible Thanksgivings, and plenty of the country's families, split by a state line or a stubborn uncle, had the argument right there at the table. The word Franksgiving entered the language, half joke, half insult.

The Year of Two Thanksgivings

For two Novembers, the country kept two calendars. Communities that followed the President put up their wreaths and planned their parades a week early; communities that held out made a point of keeping Thanksgiving exactly where tradition had put it. Football games were moved or doubled. Families that lived near a state line sometimes ate two dinners, one on each Thursday, and counted themselves lucky to have the problem. The country was having a family argument in public, the way families do.

By 1941 the argument had tired itself out. Congress settled it, fixing Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of November — a date that split the difference between the holiday of memory and the holiday of commerce. The date became law, and there it has stayed.

The fourth Thursday is an odd thing to have gone to war over. It has no meaning of its own. It can fall as early as the 22nd or as late as the 28th; it is the last Thursday in a four-Thursday November and the second-to-last in a five-Thursday one. But it is a middle date, never so late that the season feels spent and never so early that the month seems shortchanged. The country chose it the way families choose a compromise: not because anyone loved it, but because everyone could live with it.

The Warm Seam in the Cold Month

What the argument finally proved is that the date was never the real thing. The real thing is what happens on the date. The Wednesday before, the grocery store is a cheerful mess of carts and cranberry sauce, and the checkout lines move with a patience the rest of the year cannot manage. The roads fill with the country's annual migration of people heading home. The good plates come out of the china cabinet, the ones that see the light once a year. The folding chairs come up from the basement. The kitchen window fogs over, because the oven has been running since morning and will not stop until after dark.

The meal itself has settled into a canon, though every family insists its version is the true one. Turkey, or ham, or both, depending on the household and the region. Stuffing or dressing, and the argument over the name is older than the one over the date. Mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy, cranberry. A green bean dish that no one claims to love and everyone finishes. At least one pie burned slightly around one edge, which everyone pretends not to notice. The television plays the parade that has marched through the same New York streets for nearly a century. The football game is on, and someone in every house is watching it alone in the other room while everyone else talks.

Later comes the walk. The cold air is sharply good, and the streets are quiet in a way that feels shared, because everyone else is, at that exact moment, either walking or asleep. The lamps are on in every window. The whole country seems to be exhaling.

Thanksgiving is November's way of keeping its promises. The month brings early dark, and the holiday answers with lamps in every window by five. The month brings cold, and the holiday answers with a hot oven and a crowded table. The month strips the fields and the gardens bare, and the holiday sets down in the middle of the bareness a table full of plenty. The fourth Thursday was settled a long time ago, by a nation that argued about it loudly and then moved on. But the month it sits in is older than any law about it. The leaves still come down. The frost still whitens the roofs. The porch light still comes on at five. And every November, a kitchen window steams up from the inside, and the table is laid, and the holiday that had to be argued into place arrives right on time, the way it always does.