Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving means the giving of thanks. In lower case it is the act itself; with a capital it is the holiday, kept in the United States on the fourth Thursday of November. In 2026 that is Thursday 26 November. Q: Why does English say that thanks are "given"? A: Because thanks were once a thought. The root first. Thank comes from Old English þancian, "to thank," whose noun þanc meant "thought; favour; thanks" in one word. Beside it stood þencan, "to think," the modern think, and both go back to Proto-Indo-European *tong-, "to think, to feel". German keeps the same pair, danken and denken. Thank is the sibling of think, and in English to be thankful was to hold what you received in mind. A thought that comes out becomes words. In Middle English the plural thankes settled into "words of thanks," and to hand those words over is thanks-giving: the verb phrase give thanks fused into one noun, which Etymonline dates to the 1530s, the decade of the English Bible translations. Lower-case thanksgiving is a word of the liturgy, not of the feast. Now the feast. The scene usually cited for the holiday's origin is Plymouth in the autumn of 1621. Many of the Mayflower settlers had not survived the first winter; those who remained brought in their corn and held a feast. The account is a letter of Edward Winslow, printed the next year in Mourt's Relation (1622): "our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together". The letter goes on to say that the Wampanoag leader Massasoit came with some ninety men, stayed three days, and brought five deer. One thing should be said plainly: nowhere in the account does the word thanksgiving appear. Winslow's word is rejoice. To the Puritans a thanksgiving was a day of worship, the counterpart of a fast, and a harvest feast was a different thing; the two were joined as "the first Thanksgiving" only long afterwards. Thanksgiving Day is not attested until the 1670s (Etymonline), and the custom, kept on different days in different colonies, became a national day by way of three documents. On 3 October 1789 Washington, at the request of both Houses of Congress, recommended "a day of public thanksgiving and prayer" and assigned Thursday 26 November of that year (Founders Online). The magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale then petitioned for years for a single national day, and on 3 October 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed "the last Thursday of November" a day of thanksgiving. When Roosevelt moved the day a week earlier in 1939 and 1940 and the states split, a joint resolution of Congress on 26 December 1941 fixed "the fourth Thursday". So in years when November has five Thursdays, the fourth and not the last is the day; in 2026 the 26th is both. Since 1970 the United American Indians of New England have kept a "National Day of Mourning" at Plymouth on the same date, one date with two names, recorded here as a fact. Back to Korean. 추수감사절 is 秋收感謝節, a 節 (festival) of 感謝 (thanks) for the 秋收 (autumn harvest). Korean Protestant churches keep it on the third Sunday of November, in 2026 the 15th. The custom goes back to 1904, when the Presbyterian Council of Korea, on the motion of Seo Gyeong-jo, set a day of thanks (at first 10 November); in 1914 the Presbyterian General Assembly moved it to the Wednesday after the third Sunday of November, and it later moved to the Sunday itself (National Institute of Korean History; Encyclopedia of Korean Culture). The Standard Korean Language Dictionary defines 추수감사절 as the day on which Christians, once a year after the autumn grain is gathered, offer a service of thanks to God. The 謝 of 感謝 is "to thank in return," a repaying in words. But Korean has the native 고맙다, and the Standard Korean Language Dictionary defines it as being glad and warm of heart at a kindness or help received from another. If English thank began as a thought, 고맙다 begins as a fullness of heart, and both need something received first. The East had its feast after the harvest too. The "Seventh Month" (七月) of the Book of Odes sings the farming year month by month and closes: "two jars of wine for the feast, a lamb killed, up into the lord's hall, the rhinoceros-horn cup raised, ten thousand years without end". The rice comes in in the tenth month and the cup is raised, a harvest feast long before Plymouth, and it ends not in thanks but in a wish for long life. English, after the harvest, gave thanks; the Odes, after the harvest, raised a cup. To hold what was received in mind and to bring it out in words: those two motions are what thanksgiving holds.