HAPPY THANKSGIVING from Everyone at Dvorak Uncensored.
Thanksgiving Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln — I’m always amused by the cock and bull story about Thanksgiving being about Pilgrims, maize, turkeys and Indians when the holiday stems from an Abe Lincoln proclamation at the behest of a magazine editor. The road to today’s Thanksgiving has had a rocky road, in fact.
I’m not sure when the baloney about Pilgrims and Indians actually took hold as folklore, but I find it offensive that it is taught in schools as fact..
That said, who is complaining about days off? And I do like a good turkey and gladly spend the extra money for a real old-fashioned bird with real flavor. A great turkey actually tastes more like pheasant and does not have that exaggerated turkey flavor you get from commercial birds. I’m convinced that the only reason that people are deep fat frying these birds nowadays is to minimize that obnoxious taste only recently bred into the birds.
This is the proclamation which set the precedent for America’s national day of Thanksgiving. During his administration, President Lincoln issued many orders like this. For example, on November 28, 1861, he ordered government departments closed for a local day of thanksgiving.
The holiday we know today as Thanksgiving was recommended to Lincoln by Sarah Josepha Hale, a prominent magazine editor. Her letters to Lincoln urged him to have the “day of our annual Thanksgiving made a National and fixed Union Festival.” The document below sets apart the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise.”
According to an April 1, 1864 letter from John Nicolay, one of Lincoln’s secretaries, this document was written by Secretary of State William Seward, and the original was in his handwriting. Fellow Cabinet member Gideon Welles recorded in his diary on October 3 that he complimented Seward on his work. A year later, the manuscript was sold to benefit Union troops and since then has disappeared.
Oh, and I apparently bitched about this last year with a snarky, but well-researched piece on the various iterations of Thanksgiving.
And likewise people only celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. when Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into law in 1983.
RBG
As a resident of a state with a wild turkey population and a hunter, I have consumed many “natural” turkeys. Except for one antifreeze injected Butterball variety from ConAgra every turkey on my table at Thanksgiving time has been superior to a wild turkey.
No need to denigrate our feeding habits when they provide for our breeding habits need to overpopulate the world. A Happy Thanksgiving to all, even you assholes who disgust me with your backwoods limited intellect and republican addiction.
We to have plentiful wild turkeys in our state. They are among the weirdest critters I have had the luxury to observe in the wild. Wild turkeys are also capable of very short distance low altitude bursts of flight. Hiking one fall I spooked one hiding along side the trail. It nearly ran me over as it fled; it scared the living bejeezuz out of me too! They can get quite large in the wild if conditions are good. Anyways just thought I would share that crazy story and some turkey facts. Happy Thanksgiving Everyone !
Look at it this way, Beaujolais Nouveau and wild game were made for each other.
While Halloween might be fairly ancient. The tradition of “Trick or Treat” is not. It got its start, sometime after the Depression (1930s). My elderly mother recalls hearing about it for the first time, on a radio broadcast, when Mary Martin (Broadway star) promoted the idea. Even then, it wasn’t too popular for a time. Children were even protesting (probably aided by adults) against being beggars. But I guess the constant pressure of the candy companies, overcame this stigma. It wasn’t adopted in Canada until the 80s. And I believe the UK only recently has.
I believe that the recent change of the DST (ending) date, to 1st Sunday in November, was one more concession to aid candy sales. So the parents wouldn’t be concerned about it being too dark for their kids to be out begging for treats.
Frankly I think it’s kooky to put kids at risk this way, just to use up the stale candy supply, before Christmas. It may have been a fairly safe marketing trick, back in the 1930s. But with kids becoming endanger of abductions, and other weirdness. I think it’s something that should have been phased out by now. Not promoted anew, by the mainstream media, and protected from any negative opinions and accounts. A couple years ago, on a US Tv series, a character said “Needles in candy bars, never happened”. They certainly x-rayed a lot of candy, for something that never happened. More media propaganda.
#25, Glenn,
Modern Trick or Treating grew out of the Scottish tradition of “guising”, going door to door asking for coins.
Dressing up in costume has been traced back to the Celts and begging for favors was a tradition for many religious celebrations.
The first noted modern Hallowe’en Trick or Treating as we know it can be traced to Kingston Ontario in 1911 when the local newspaper reported on the “tradition”. So it must have been done for years before that and Kingston has a strong Scottish immigrant history.
Mr parents have told stories of trick or treating during the 1920s and ’30s.
Every holiday and celebration has evolved with modern practices and concerns. Where homes used to provide home made treats, today home made treats are treated with scorn by children and extreme caution by parents. Where costumes used to be home made, today almost all costumes are store bought. What hasn’t changed is that parents or older siblings take their children from door to door with the children yelling “Trick or Treat” at each one.
I thought that on this day in 1801, Lewis and Clark landed on Fraggle Rock, made friends with the neighboring Mexicans, ate turkey, drank beer, and watched NFL. Back then, the Pilgrims had a great quarterback.
Isn’t that why we eat prime rib and cheesecake?
Regardless, I still love Thanksgiving, maybe even more than Christmas.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
Did you know that the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock because they ran out of beer?
http://beerinstitute.org/tier.asp?bid=141