Thanksgiving celebrated in US is the last thursday of November. Why is it on the 2nd last thursday this year?

President Lincoln established Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863. In 1939 FDR changed Thanksgiving from the last Thursday to the fourth Thursday. Below is Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation. Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime, truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. It has seemed to me fit and proper that God should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged, as with one heart and one voice, by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to be apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. Abraham Lincoln - October 3, 1863

It is celebrated on the 4TH Thursday, this gives retailer an extra week to sell things before Christmas.

It is not the last Thursday. It will be on the fourth Thursday. Previously it was the 3rd Thursday, but a former President changed it.

It is actually celebrated on the 4th Thursday of November. Most of the time it's the last Thursday. It used to always be on the last Thursday, but one of the Presidents changed this.

Thanksgiving used to be a floating holiday meaning it changed days. FDR made it a set time being the 4th thursday of the month so there would be a month apart for retailers to have holidays sales.

because it is always celebrated on the 4th. thursday of November, not the last thursday.

Are You sure that it is not normally celebrated on the Fourth Thursday in Noverber?

The fourth Thursday of November. I'm not an American and even I know that.

So we can get an extra week of shopping in before Christmas.