“Thanksgiving was in four days”: something sounds funny!

Solution 1:

It’s not a pre­cise com­par­i­son, but let’s con­sider, for a mo­ment, the “plu­per­fect” con­struc­tion.

• I had taken a shower when the door­bell rang.

Com­pare to the past tense:

• I took a shower.

The “plu­per­fect” is the “past past”, which is to say that you’re talk­ing about some point in the past, but re­fer­ring to an event that is even fur­ther in the past. At the (past tense) mo­ment the door­bell rang, you had taken a shower. The shower is even fur­ther into the past than the past to which we’re re­fer­ring.

If I had said I took a shower when the door­bell rang, that would have been a dif­fer­ent state­ment — that the doorbell rang, and then I took a shower.

Ding Dong!

turns on shower

Now, to your ex­am­ple:

• Thanks­giv­ing was in four days, and Pey­ton had a feel­ing she was go­ing to miss it.

This is a sim­i­lar con­struc­tion. You are re­fer­ring to a spe­cific point in the past, at which Thanks­giv­ing was four days in the fu­ture. It’s not four days in the fu­ture right now, but it was at the time to which you are re­fer­ring. If the “plu­per­fect” con­struc­tion is the “past past”, this is the “past fu­ture” con­struc­tion.

If there’s a spe­cific gram­mat­i­cal term for this con­struc­tion, I don’t know it, but it may be some­thing called the “past pro­gres­sive con­struc­tion”.