When Is Thanksgiving?

The American date comes from a statute. Since 1942 Congress has fixed Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, the settlement of a mess Franklin Roosevelt made in 1939 by moving the traditional last Thursday a week earlier and splitting the country over an improvised holiday he was nicknamed “Franksgiving” for. The Canadian date comes from a proclamation: on 31 January 1957 Governor General Vincent Massey named the second Monday of October, when the harvest across most of the country is already in and the weather has not yet closed the travel season. Canada’s national Thanksgiving had drifted before that — the first was called on 6 November 1879.

Because October has 31 days, 1 November always lands three weekdays later in the week than 1 October does. That single fact welds the two rules together: move the second Monday of October and the fourth Thursday of November moves with it, so the interval is always exactly 45 days — six weeks and three days — not just in the years above but in any year a calendar can print. The same geometry has a second consequence: the day Canada takes off for Thanksgiving is always the day the United States marks Columbus Day, which is also gazetted as the second Monday of October. Two nations, one date, two entirely different reasons.

Both calendars gazette a single day. Everything around it differs. The American day is a Thursday, so the break runs Thursday to Sunday, and the Friday after it — Black Friday, a legal holiday in no state — is taken off by schools, retailers and most offices. That is why our United States pages record a four-day Thanksgiving weekend in every published year. The Canadian day is a Monday, so the break is Saturday to Monday and the Friday before it is a working day. Same festival, one extra weekday of distance from the weekend, one fewer day off.

Who is actually obliged to close is where the two systems diverge hardest. In Canada, Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday only in federal jurisdiction, which binds banks, airlines, telecommunications and other federally regulated employers everywhere; provincial employees depend on their own province, and Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia do not automatically treat it as a general holiday. In the United States the day is a federal holiday — one of eleven — closing federal offices, the postal service and the New York Stock Exchange, while most shops and restaurants stay open. Only Thanksgiving and Christmas bring anything like a near-total shutdown there, and neither of them says a word about your pay: that is your employer’s policy, not the statute.

Japan closes on 23 November for Labor Thanksgiving Day (勤労感謝の日), a national holiday established in 1948 to honour production and each other’s labour. It descends from the imperial Niinamesai harvest rite, not from anything imported from North America, and its standard English translation is the only thing that makes the two look related. South Korea’s Chuseok is routinely glossed as “Korean Thanksgiving”, but it is the autumn harvest festival on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month — the same full moon as China’s Mid-Autumn Festival — and it is three days off, not one. Neither appears in the tables above, because neither is this festival. One year they do collide, though: in 2028 Thanksgiving Day and Japan’s Labor Thanksgiving Day both fall on Thursday 23 November, which is the fourth-Thursday rule happening to land there, not a shared origin.

For the rest of our coverage the answer is simply no — Thanksgiving is not a public holiday in China, South Korea or Thailand, and the fourth Thursday of November is an ordinary working day there. Those three rows stay in the table with zero days on purpose. “Do I have to work that day?” is the question the local searcher actually arrived with, and a row that quietly disappeared would not answer it. The consequence is worth stating plainly: the two places this page can report as observing are the only two whose official lists contain the festival at all, and every day count on this page is read out of those lists rather than inferred from what Thanksgiving is supposed to mean.