9 thoughts on “Happy Thanksgiving”

  1. Thank you, Helen. Best Thanksgiving wishes to you as well. I agree on the holiday. Why shouldn’t nations adopt the better features of other nations? Particularly within the Anglosphere. Thanksgiving should be a pan-Anglospheric festival.

  2. Thnaksgiving in the manner that the US and Canada celebrates is an English invention – specifically, the English Puritans, who didn’t celebrate Christmas because it wasn’t specifically sanctioned in the Bible. The only holidays mentioned were Days of Thanksgiving (and Days of Fasting and Humiliation, which aren’t exactly celebrations), so Thanksgiving Day became more or less the substitute for Chistmas-type festivites. This got brought to New England. Christmas continued to be the big celebration in the Middle and Southern colonies and of course Dutch New York, where they didn’t take their Calvinism quite as seriously — Sinter Klaas continued to survive. In typical American fashion, we never chose between them but just started to celebrate both, and threw in Sinter Klaas as well, even if we Americanized his name. The English gave up on Thanksgiving after Restoration, but we didn’t want to give up another chnace for a party. Americans are pretty eclectic about holidays, especially where food and drink is involved. Cinco de Mayo is becoming a general holiday (defeating the French is always worth celebrating) and Chinese New Years is probably not far behind, at least in California — hey, firecrackers, too!

    So, Happy Thanksgiving, and everyone else is welcome to join us. You can even watch an American football game to really get into it.

  3. Of course, the Day of Fasting and Humiliation has been revived as well, although it is now called Earth Day. It is, tellingly enough, most rigorously observed in the regions colonized from New England — the Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest.

  4. Happy Thanksgiving to all ChicagoBoyz and -Grrrlz, to our readers, our friends and enemies.

    Eat well. Hug everybody. Make peace with the family and friends.

    We are blessed and we have a lot to be thankful for.

    God bless America.

  6. Happy Thanksgiving!

    There are wild turkeys all over the place here in the Boston suburbs. They told us 20 years ago when they reintroduced them in the Quabbin that these birds were so shy and so canny that the average citizen might never see one, but the turkeys seem to have read the Massachusetts statutes saying that we may not discharge a firearm within 500 feet of a road or a dwelling. Canny they may be, but not shy. They have figured out how to knock down bird feeders, and they now chase kindergarteners waiting for the school bus. I propose a three point program: spear, cook, and eat. Maybe we can breed their legendary shyness back into them.

    Anyone need a recipe for gerbil stuffing?

  7. Thank you, Helen. And, indeed, we have much to be thankful for. I would like to thank those on this blog for patience and, most of all, Jonathan, for his willingness to do the dirty work so we can play.

    Surely harvest dinners in any agricultural economy must be archetypal (they show up in Hardy, for instance).

  8. Harvest suppers still exist and Harvest Festival is one of the finest in the C of E certainly. I imagine other churches celebrate them as well. They tend to be at different times, though. November is a little late for us – the harvest has been taken in already. When I was a child in Hungary, the new bread was celebrated on August 20, which is a little early for England, where Harvest Festival tends to be in early October.

  9. Thank you Helen, much appreciated.

    Mitch – we have tons of wild turkeys all over the place here in Wisconsin as well. That animal, along with many others has made quite the comeback and I don’t think they even introduced them. They are even in my subdivision.

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