It’s Thanksgiving Season (#2)

So here we are, nine days into the Thanksgiving season already.  Didn’t the time positively fly  (even with the extra hour last Sunday)?  Have you already booked your travel to visit loved ones later in the month? Have you already made pumpkin pie (because you can never have enough pumpkin pie, so why wait until Thanksgiving Day)?  Whatever you’ve done for the past nine days, I’ve already hinted at the three “F’s” of Thanksgiving: food, family, and friends.  Now let’s add a fourth.

Not football.  Not fun runs.  The most important Thanksgiving “F” is full; as in “full of thanks”.  You are thankful this season, aren’t you?  If you joined my bandwagon from last week’s post, you already have nine reasons (or nine people) to be thankful for.  Keep that list going until the big day, band-wagoner.

Now that you know the four (not three) “F’s” of Thanksgiving, let’s visit five facts you probably don’t know about the holiday.  Here’s a morsel for your taste buds: the very first Thanksgiving feast probably included lobster, deer, swans, and seals.  PETA and I struggle with those last two, but the list stands to reason because we’re talking pilgrims and Indians on the coast of Massachusetts, four hundred years ago, making merry for three straight days.  Those flavorful “entrees” were abundant back then, with nary a turkey to be found.

Too cute to eat!

Remember last week’s mention of Abraham Lincoln making Thanksgiving a holiday?  That was in 1863, declared as every last Thursday in November.  Seventy-odd years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving Day one week earlier to extend the shopping season during the Great Depression.  But some states pushed back on Roosevelt’s pushback so in the 1940s you had several years with multiple Thanksgiving Days (more turkey for everyone – hooray!)  Eventually the compromise was made as we know it today: one Thanksgiving Day, the fourth Thursday of every November.

My wife and I love dinner in front of the TV, don’t you?  But have you actually eaten a TV dinner?  You know, the frozen full meal in a box, with the tiny portions of generic food in the partitioned aluminum-foil tray?  Well, you can thank Thanksgiving for TV dinners.  Swanson overestimated the demand for turkey one year, and in a totally give-that-person-a-raise move, converted 260 tons of leftover turkey into 5,000 hand-packed dinners, complete with dressing, gravy, peas, and sweet potatoes, at a mere $0.98 a pop.  A year later they’d sold ten million of them.  Voila – the birth of the TV dinner.

Trivia question: What teams always play football on Thanksgiving Day?  Trivia answer: the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions.  Better trivia question: What teams first played football on Thanksgiving Day? Answer: Yale and Princeton way-y-y-y back in 1876.  I didn’t even know football was a sport in 1876.  As for games played on Thanksgiving Day, I would’ve guessed they started like, a hundred years after that.

If your Aunt Betty spends a little too much time at the holiday punch bowl and thinks it’s funny to start gobble-gobble-gobbling at your kids, you might want to remind her females don’t gobble.  Er, female turkeys that is. The signature Thanksgiving sound is reserved for the males of the species.  Female turkeys have been known to purr and cackle instead.  This is good information for your Aunt Betty (the purr , not the cackle).

Pay it “backward”

Okay, enough what-you-didn’t-know fun for today.  Let’s wrap with another nod to being thank-full (or, if you will, having “gra-attitude”).  I love this time of year because Starbucks gives away free coffee.  Okay, so they’re not really giving away free coffee.  Instead, drive-thru patrons continue the seasonal tradition of paying for the car behind them (and driving off quickly so as to remain anonymous).  I go to Starbucks more often just to participate (as payer, not payee).  So, for whatever you are grateful for, share that happy feeling with the people behind you in line.  Not a patron of Starbucks?  Doesn’t matter; any drive-thru will do.  So c’mon, get grateful already!

Some content sourced from the October 2023 Town & Country Magazine article, “14 Surprising Facts You Never Knew About Thanksgiving”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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Author: Dave

Five hundred posts would suggest I have something to say… This blog was born from a desire to elevate the English language, highlighting eloquent words from days gone by. The stories I share are snippets of life itself, and each comes with a bonus: a dusted-off word I hope you’ll go on to use more often. Read “Deutschland-ish Improvements” to learn about my backyard European wish list. Try “Slush Fun” for the throwback years of the 7-Eleven convenience store. Or drink in "Iced Coffee" to discover the plight of the rural French cafe. On the lighter side, read "Late Night Racquet Sports" for my adventures with our latest moth invasion. As Walt Whitman said, “That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” Here then, my verse. Welcome to Life In A Word.

21 thoughts on “It’s Thanksgiving Season (#2)”

  1. Lots of good Thanksgiving trivia! We will be spending Thanksgiving in Michigan this year, I am more optimistic for a Lions win this year. Sad when they have a better record than MSU. I’d say I have basketball to look forward to, but their season opener was a little rough.

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    1. Good thing James Madison wasn’t the one who made Thanksgiving official huh? 😁 No, I really can’t talk either. We were at the ND-Clemson game last weekend, watching our major bowl chances go up in flames. Broncos are lousy too so maybe I’ll join the Lions bandwagon ha.

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    1. That was new information on me. Two Thanksgiving Days – sounds more like something you’d see today instead of all those years ago. Maybe those same people can help us come to a consensus on Daylight Savings Time!

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      1. Not everybody liked Roosevelt’s politics and in more conservative areas there was active resistance to his “New Deal” and anything even remotely Roosevelt like. The small California Farming town my grandfather lived in had plenty of people on both sides of the fence and he tried to cash in on both.

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  4. I loved learning all the trivia in this post Dave! I also wonder about the pilgrims and Indians’ holiday fare choices; you’re right that PETA would be up in arms over that. Interesting about Swanson TV dinners. When I was growing up, we had TV dinners as a Saturday night treat or if we had something going on that would prohibit my mom making a hot meal, doing dishes, etc. My favorite was the beans and franks dinner with stewed apples and cornbread. I had no idea of the origin of the turkey dinner with stuffing – $0.98 was a bargain for sure and yes, that employee deserved much more than an “employee of the month” award! It’s important to recognize that Thanksgiving is more than the flavor of the season, or football, or 5K runs, but about being thankful.

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    1. I’m sure we both had the same TV dinners at one time or another (and for the same reasons). They were novel enough to not really care how they tasted. Today? I wouldn’t go near one 🙂

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      1. Yes, for sure – they are likely sodium-laden so unhealthy now. Do you remember a few years back Pringles came out with potato crisps that had all the flavors of Thanksgiving dinner? I never tried them, but I heard Amazon couldn’t keep them in stock. I heard on the news this morning that Baskin-Robbins has a Thanksgiving dinner-inspired ice cream, with all the flavors except turkey. It is called “Turkey Day Fixins” ice cream flavor.

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  5. Enjoyed the trivia on what football games play on Thanksgiving Day. How do you pay for someone’s coffee behind you if you don’t know what they are ordering… I mean how much to pay? I’ve never done that before, but it sounds like a great idea.

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    1. By the time you drive up to the pick-up window they’ve already taken the order for the car or two behind you, so they can tell you the amount. But REAL generosity is agreeing to pay before you know the amount. One time I ended up buying a family of four their entire breakfast. But I’ve also had my own coffee paid for several times. It’s a great gesture for the holiday season.

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  6. But have you actually eaten a TV dinner? Yes, much to my regret. I like what was supposedly in the meal better when I make it from scratch! That being said, I’m not much for turkey in general so the traditional Thanksgiving meal is to me, meh.

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    1. My mother was a really good cook whose sons didn’t appreciate her meals when we were little. Hence, the occasional TV dinner was an adventure, something different from the norm no matter how bad it tasted 🙂

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  7. Hi Dave,
    I enjoy eating in front of the TV as usual, but not TV dinners.
    A happy Thanksgiving to you! Even though we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving in Brazil as we do here, I will be going to Brazil to spend it with my family.
    Blessings!

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  8. Thank you for the fun read, Dave. Loved learning how Swanson TV dinners came to be! And I had to grin when you used the name “Aunt Betty” for the relative who likes the punch bowl a little too much. I’m quite sure my Aunt Betty NEVER had a drop of alcohol her entire 90+ years of life!

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  9. I have not had a TV Dinner in a LONG time. I remember that the little dessert in the upper center section could be pretty good, though there was never enough of it.

    Do I get extra points for reading this on Thanksgiving? 🙂

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