Thursday Things: Happy Thanksgiving 2024 Edition
28 November 2024. Vol 6 No 48. By Dan McGirt. #277
Thursday Things is here! This week we say you’re welcome, serve a slice of holiday history in audio form, and above all wish you a Happy Thanksgiving!
If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.
May your harvest be bountiful. Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash
Thank you, Happy Subscribers!
Thank you to all our Happy Subscribers to Thursday Things for joining us each week. Today all of us here at Thursday Things wish you safe travels and warm fellowship as you gather with family and friends this Thanksgiving.
(And for our international subscribers for whom this is not a holiday — we’ll save you a slice of pumpkin pie!)
You’re Welcome
For your Thanksgiving amusement, we present this viral video from 2009. It’s a classic. You’re welcome.
Notes on Thanksgiving
And if you want something Thanksgiving thematic to listen to in the car today as you go over the river and through the woods, here is an episode from The History of the Americans podcast:
Sidebar: Notes on Thanksgiving (Encore Presentation)
https://thehistoryoftheamericans.com/sidebar-notes-on-thanksgiving-encore-presentation/
This is an encore presentation of one of most popular episodes, “Notes on Thanksgiving,” which dropped on Thanksgiving Day, 2021. This is a great pre-listen for your Thanksgiving celebration, insofar as you will be able to roll out all sorts of impressive Thanksgiving history factoids and impress those all-important in-laws! The original show notes are reproduced below.
If you prefer to listen on a podcast app, here is the link for Apple:
And for Spotify:
This November, it has been 400 years [Now 403 years - ThTh] since the traditional First Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony – Patuxet in 1621. But the history of that collaborative feast of the English and the Wampanoag Indians was lost for more than 200 years. For most of that time, Americans celebrated “thanksgiving” all over the country at different days in the autumn, decreed by local and state governments, without knowing its origin story. This episode explores the conversion of thanksgiving from a local custom to a revered national holiday. Along the way, we learn about Sarah Josepha Hale, the remarkable woman to whom Americans owe the greatest debt for the holiday they will celebrate today.
There were political objections to Thanksgiving, too, rooted in exactly the debates we have today after the proper role of the federal government, and how precisely to separate church and state.
Finally, we learn about the central role of football on Thanksgiving, dating from Thanksgiving of 1873, only four years after the first college football game. By 1893, Americans were playing thousands of games of football across the country on Thanksgiving Day. Oh, and we should all be grateful that President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t screw it all up, which he very nearly did.
Enjoy!
Thank you for reading!
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