Free Printable Happy Thanksgiving Coloring Page PDF

Happy Thanksgiving: History & Fun Facts

Quick Facts

• Sarah Josepha Hale lobbied five US presidents over seventeen years for a national day of thanksgiving.
• Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November a national day of thanks in October 1863.
• Congress fixed Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November by joint resolution in December 1941.
• The Plymouth Plantation harvest feast of 1621 lasted three days and included about ninety Wampanoag men.
• Godey's Lady's Book, edited by Sarah Hale, was the most-read American magazine of the 1860s.
• Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has marched through Manhattan every year since 1924 except 1942 to 1944.

Writing Happy Thanksgiving across the top of a paper sheet became a classroom ritual long before printers were common. Teachers in the late 1800s pulled the phrase across chalkboards in chalky white block letters and asked students to copy it into autograph books. The bubble-letter version popular in modern coloring sheets traces its style to bulletin-board lettering kits sold by school-supply companies in the 1950s and 60s, when teachers needed a fast way to dress up cork-board displays for the holiday.

Thanksgiving as a US national holiday — the timeline

Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, spent seventeen years writing letters to five US presidents asking for a fixed national day of thanksgiving. President Abraham Lincoln finally acted in October 1863, declaring the last Thursday of November a national day of thanks and praise. President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it forward by one week in 1939 to extend the Christmas shopping season, sparking enough public protest that Congress passed a joint resolution in December 1941 fixing the holiday on the fourth Thursday of November permanently. The date has held ever since, which is why Thanksgiving always lands somewhere between the twenty-second and twenty-eighth of the month.

Where the words came from

The phrase day of thanksgiving predates the US holiday by more than a thousand years. Medieval English harvest sermons used it to mean a public day of gratitude after a good crop or the end of a plague. Dutch Calvinist congregations carried the practice to New Amsterdam in the 1620s, and English Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation held an autumn harvest feast in 1621 that lasted three days and included about ninety Wampanoag men led by Massasoit. The word Thanksgiving itself, capital T, only became a fixed proper noun for the November feast in American newspapers around the 1850s.

Why bubble lettering became the holiday look

Hollow rounded letters work in classrooms for two reasons. Children can color the inside of each letter in a different shade, which keeps young learners engaged longer than a single word in plain black. The thick outline also reads well from across a room, which matters for hallway bulletin boards and classroom door decorations. Letter-shaping kits from companies like Ellison began stamping cardstock bubble alphabets in the 1970s, and stencil sets soon followed. The bouncy uneven baseline often seen in HAPPY THANKSGIVING displays comes from one tradition: each letter is cut by a different child and stapled up in the order they finish.