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.
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).
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”.
Life In A Word 