November 2016 - Thanksgiving & Trump
The fourth thursday of November, Americans gather for a day of feasting, football and family, aka Thanksgiving day.
Thanksgiving dinner is probably the most important meal of the year for Americans. The traditional menu depends from state to state (mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, sweet potatoes casserole with mashed potatoes!!! 😳, corn, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie...), but where ever you are the (stuffed) Turkey is the center piece! And these turkeys are huge!!
I can truly understand the meat sweat and sweatpants of Joey Tribbiani when I think about it 😅
The 'Broad Breasted White Turkeys' are commercially the most widely used breed and are particularly bred for Thanksgiving (and Christmas). Their size (specimens can grow ups to 40 pounds!!) makes them ideal for big family meals, but makes them flightless and natural reproduction is impossible as the males are just too fat to mount the hens anymore 😂, and on top of that they suffer from health problems such as heart disease respiratory problems and joint damage due to its weight 😕
On various occasions throughout US history, turkeys have been donated to Presidents as gifts from private citizens. Henry Vose, a Rhode Island turkey farmer, presented a turkey to the President for Thanksgiving and Christmas from 1873 until his death in 1913, but the official presentation of a turkey to the President at Thanksgiving began in 1947 under President Harry Truman. Truman and his successor Eisenhower just ate the birds, but John F. Kennedy spontaneously spared a turkey on November 18 1963, just 4 days before Kennedy's assassination, but it was not a formal 'turkey pardon' as we know it today.
Likewise, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan didn't eat all the birds they got presented, but it was president George H.W. Bush who introduced the formal 'turkey pardon' in 1989, when he looked at his turkey and said "Let me assure this fine tom he will not end up on anyone's dinner table. Not this guy. He's been granted a presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here."
Since then, the 'turkey pardon' tradition has been cemented.
Sadly though, the turkeys don't profit very long from their pardon as they usually die within a year from complications related to obesity ... Obesity in the States, really? 😏
Football however is probably as important as the turkey on that day ... I even suspect the turkey to be the favourite dish because of the football! I mean, while the turkey is getting ready for hours in the oven, it leaves you free to do other things (read: hang out and watch a football game).
Football and Thanksgiving have been coupled since the birth of both. Only six years after Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a 'day of Thanksgiving & praise' in 1863 as a national holiday, the first football game (which was only invented a few weeks earlier) was organised in Philadelphia on that day. Since then, football games have purposely been organised on that day throughout the country as it is a day off for everybody, guaranteeing a big supporting crowd on the field.
Ok, now you know how the Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, but we haven't talked yet about what they are celebrating.
Most Americans associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians sitting down together for a big feast in 1621 at the Plymouth Plantation. This feast was a way to thank the Indians for helping the Pilgrims, who arrived in 1620 with the Mayflower from England, to survive their first winter.
This happy feast, which is considered to be the first Thanksgiving celebration, between the Natives and the Pilgrims is the way Thanksgiving is here presented @ the schools today ... and probably it did happen - but only once! Thereafter, many other Thanksgiving celebrations took place, but mostly to celebrate a military victory, which often were Indian massacres! For this reason, for many Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a day to be thankful, but a day of mourning the loss of millions of their people, the theft of their land and the continuous assault on their culture. Since 1970, Native Americans gather at Cole's Hill in Plymouth on Thanksgiving day to commemorate a 'National Day of Mourning'. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which they continue to experience.
As I mentioned before, different Thanksgiving days were celebrated at the different States of the US, at different moments for different reasons. In 1863 it was Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed the official Thanksgiving day on the fourth thursday of November as a day for the entire nation to show gratitude for its many blessings.
I've wondered whether Thanksgiving is bigger than Christmas here in the US. Although Thanksgiving is probably celebrated by more people because it is considered to be a secular celebration, making it a holiday for every American, it is the commercialisation that makes Christmas bigger. (Too) many weeks before Christmas eve, there are many songs, movies and TV specials getting us in the Christmas mood & most of all in the commercial spending mood 💰
Other than getting people to buy the Turkey for the Thanksgiving family diner, and the pumpkins that many never actually eat (you can buy here pumpkin puree out of a can 😏), corporate America hasn't figured out yet how to better commercialise Thanksgiving ... not even through the Joey Tribbiani sweatpants??! 😂
As we took advantage of this long Thanksgiving weekend to explore Southern Utah and Northern Arizona (more about this in my next post), we spend our first Thanksgiving in Page, in an overcrowded Thai restaurant which was one of the only restaurants open on that evening ... little did we know then that Thanksgiving is one of the only evenings in the US where commercial profits has to give way to family time!
On November 8th 2016 President Trump was elected as the 45th president of the Unites States and took the oath of office on January 20th 2017. Now that we are 7 months into his presidency, I think we've all heard and seen enough, so I'm not wasting any more space in this post on this awful event.
Or maybe just a little space for this one as it related to the other subject of this post ...
Thanksgiving dinner is probably the most important meal of the year for Americans. The traditional menu depends from state to state (mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, sweet potatoes casserole with mashed potatoes!!! 😳, corn, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie...), but where ever you are the (stuffed) Turkey is the center piece! And these turkeys are huge!!
I can truly understand the meat sweat and sweatpants of Joey Tribbiani when I think about it 😅
On various occasions throughout US history, turkeys have been donated to Presidents as gifts from private citizens. Henry Vose, a Rhode Island turkey farmer, presented a turkey to the President for Thanksgiving and Christmas from 1873 until his death in 1913, but the official presentation of a turkey to the President at Thanksgiving began in 1947 under President Harry Truman. Truman and his successor Eisenhower just ate the birds, but John F. Kennedy spontaneously spared a turkey on November 18 1963, just 4 days before Kennedy's assassination, but it was not a formal 'turkey pardon' as we know it today.
Likewise, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan didn't eat all the birds they got presented, but it was president George H.W. Bush who introduced the formal 'turkey pardon' in 1989, when he looked at his turkey and said "Let me assure this fine tom he will not end up on anyone's dinner table. Not this guy. He's been granted a presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here."
Since then, the 'turkey pardon' tradition has been cemented.
Sadly though, the turkeys don't profit very long from their pardon as they usually die within a year from complications related to obesity ... Obesity in the States, really? 😏
Football however is probably as important as the turkey on that day ... I even suspect the turkey to be the favourite dish because of the football! I mean, while the turkey is getting ready for hours in the oven, it leaves you free to do other things (read: hang out and watch a football game).
Football and Thanksgiving have been coupled since the birth of both. Only six years after Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a 'day of Thanksgiving & praise' in 1863 as a national holiday, the first football game (which was only invented a few weeks earlier) was organised in Philadelphia on that day. Since then, football games have purposely been organised on that day throughout the country as it is a day off for everybody, guaranteeing a big supporting crowd on the field.
Ok, now you know how the Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, but we haven't talked yet about what they are celebrating.
Most Americans associate the holiday with happy Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians sitting down together for a big feast in 1621 at the Plymouth Plantation. This feast was a way to thank the Indians for helping the Pilgrims, who arrived in 1620 with the Mayflower from England, to survive their first winter.
1899 Oil painting by Leon Gerome Ferris titled "The First Thanksgiving 1621"
As I mentioned before, different Thanksgiving days were celebrated at the different States of the US, at different moments for different reasons. In 1863 it was Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed the official Thanksgiving day on the fourth thursday of November as a day for the entire nation to show gratitude for its many blessings.
I've wondered whether Thanksgiving is bigger than Christmas here in the US. Although Thanksgiving is probably celebrated by more people because it is considered to be a secular celebration, making it a holiday for every American, it is the commercialisation that makes Christmas bigger. (Too) many weeks before Christmas eve, there are many songs, movies and TV specials getting us in the Christmas mood & most of all in the commercial spending mood 💰
Other than getting people to buy the Turkey for the Thanksgiving family diner, and the pumpkins that many never actually eat (you can buy here pumpkin puree out of a can 😏), corporate America hasn't figured out yet how to better commercialise Thanksgiving ... not even through the Joey Tribbiani sweatpants??! 😂
As we took advantage of this long Thanksgiving weekend to explore Southern Utah and Northern Arizona (more about this in my next post), we spend our first Thanksgiving in Page, in an overcrowded Thai restaurant which was one of the only restaurants open on that evening ... little did we know then that Thanksgiving is one of the only evenings in the US where commercial profits has to give way to family time!
On November 8th 2016 President Trump was elected as the 45th president of the Unites States and took the oath of office on January 20th 2017. Now that we are 7 months into his presidency, I think we've all heard and seen enough, so I'm not wasting any more space in this post on this awful event.
Or maybe just a little space for this one as it related to the other subject of this post ...
... and I could just not keep this one from you 😂
Comments
Post a Comment