I am getting near the age in which the Constitution allows me to run for President I have been brainstorming for a platform and the only thing I can come up with is Federal Thanksgiving reform.
Here is what I have come up with so far:
1)The Timing - Thanksgiving is situated in an atrocious place in the holiday calendar. Halloween is superb, Christmas is what it is, yet we have this odd holiday causing chaos and confusion right in the middle, It is scheduled on a Thursday in November for God’s sake and that is an obvious abomination. This may be the only time I will say this in my lifetime but the Canadians have it right. A harvest holiday should not occur at the end of November and it screws up the holiday schedule. It is overcrowded and something needs to be pruned. Move Thanksgiving to October and make it a secondary holiday with Halloween getting top October honors.
2)Fuck the Pilgrims - I am a direct descendant in the male lineage from the first colony at Jamestown with the last name to boot. Jamestown was first and the the Pilgrims were a bunch of attention whores even to this day. The first Thanksgiving was at Jamestown and no amount of grade-school construction paper crafts can ever change that . I admit you can’t get this one out of the public consciousness right away. My proposal is for public schools to give equal time between the Pilgrims and Jamestown and then slowly phase out the Pilgrims. Pocahontas was a charismatic figure and she could be the centerpiece for this PR campaign. My oppressed people demand recognition.
Turkey - It is a dirty little secret that no one likes oven roasted turkey. Even if you think you do, you don’t. That is called a self-delusion and it isn’t healthy. Oven roasted turkey is entirely bland and devoid of character. If people really like it, you would see most of them making it all year and yet they don’t. I know for a fact that turkey can be made palatable. I have had some great smoked turkey legs at fairs. Deep frying is reportedly great and brining can produce good results as well. The fact that you can walk into Home Depot and find an entire isle of alternative turkey cooking aids with people giving a guilty stare is strong evidence that many people are looking for a better alternative yet stay in the closet. My strategy will be to force the FDA to make oven roasted turkey a “public health risk”. Reports will state that the only way to make turkeys safe is to fry them in peanut oil for about three minutes per pound. Smoking the turkey skillfully will also eliminate the risk. Within one generation, public consciousness will be that turkey is always fried or smoked and the early settlers used a primitive Fry-Daddy on the first Thanksgiving.
This platform is a work in progress and I am not sure if it is enough to top the 50% mark yet. How can I perfect it?
Didn’t FDR try this during the Depression, moving Thanksgiving a week earlier so the shopping season would be longer? It was some misguided attempt to kickstart the economy, but failed miserablyand was quickly reversed.
It falls about halfway between Labor Day and Christmas, helps to have a day or so off every couple of months.
My old boss, who was NOT AT ALL religious, used to give us Good Friday off. Reason being, there were no real holidays from New Years to Memorial Day. Worked for me, the new boss is VERY religious and doles out holidays like they cost him money or something
If you’ll promise to move Thanksgiving to August, and criminalize public displays of Christmas decorations outside of December 1 through January 8, you’ve got my vote!
My wife wants me to add that the Pilgrims were a bunch of priggish assholes whom nobody wanted anyhow, and Virginians such as herself are eternally grateful that they were such incompetent navigators that they landed in the frozen swampland of Massachusetts rather than farther south.
It’s fine as long as you politely decline any kool-aid he offers ya.
The Jamestown thing I could possibly get behind, but the rest of your platform is heresy and will result in peasants, pitch forks, torches, tar and feathers if not quickly reformed.
It’s a good start. However, I would suggest moving Thanksgiving to around late march and establish Halloween as a federal holiday. Why you ask? I’ll tell you…Traditi…sorry, Fiddler moment.
Because we need a day off that time of year. You have all these holidays packed into the last six months of the year with a long lonely stretch from New Years to Memorial day for a lot of us. Make it happen President Shag!
We do still celebrate “Roosevelt Thanksgiving.” Traditionally, Thanksgiving was the last Thursday in November; Roosevelt made it the fourth Thursday in November. In fact, it is because of FDR that this year Thanksgiving was celebrated yesterday instead of on Nov. 29, the fifth Thursday in November.
Yeah, I like our Thanksgiving better. Its before the whole Halloween thing, and it doesn’t get in the way of Christmas. Plus, it lets our holiday season begin bright and early in November, giving is ample time to dedicate our attention to that specific season and not split it between that and Thanksgiving.
Also, I totally love turkey. Roast turkey on Thanksgiving with plenty of gravy, mashed potatoes, veggies drowned in butter, stuffing … it’s awesome. Then, for the next few days, you’ve got cold turkey sandwiches. On white or whole wheat with butter and salt and possibly stuffing and then nothing else. In fact, I’d take roast turkey over chicken – in facy, just about any white meat – any day of the week. You’ll take my turkey from my cold, dead, rigor-mortised hands and no other way.
Andy Rooney once suggested similar holiday timing reform. As he pointed out, both Christmas and Thanksgiviing are holidays where we get together with our families and eat turkey. You might wish to adapt his slogan, “there’s only so much family and so much turkey anyone can take.”
The timing of Thanksgiving is adapted by Roosevelt from Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863. The date was the one pushed by magazine editor Sara Josepha Hale.
Couldn’t agree more. Neither Hale’s editorial screeds nor Lincoln’s procalamtion even mention pilgrims or even harvest. The date chosen for Thanksgiving was, I presume inspired by a day of Thanksgiving called by George Washington in 1789 to be grateful for the fact that the new Constitutional government had been established without a coup disrupting the nation.
Somewhere in the late 19th Century, Thanksgiving took on the air of being some sort of commemoration of the pilgrims’ harvest festival in the second year of the colony.
Three problems with the whole Pilgrim/Thanksgiving thing:
Their harvest feast was earlier in the year. Harvests don’t happen in November, especially in coastal Massachusetts.
The pilgrim harvest feast that year wasn’t a Thanksgiving day. To the Pilgrims, a Thanksgiving day was spent praying in church, not chowing down on venison and having shooting competitions.
Pilgrims didn’t dress like that. Artists in later centuries thought the whole buckle-hatted, black shoe look was quaintly old-timey, and figured that must be the sort of garb pilgrims wore. But they didn’t wear anything like that.
So in the space of about 60-70 years, Thanksgiving went from being a patriotic day to be grateful for the success of our Union, to being a day where we are encouraged to dress up like imaginary doofuses and celebrate a harvest feast about 2-1/2 months late.
The early settlers actually don’t even mention turkey. They ate venison and “fowl” at the harvest feast, which may or may not have included turkey.
And ever since I barbecued my turkey last year (breast down, to retain moisture), you won’t find me oven-roasting it again, ever.
Yeah, but do you know how long it took to organize something like that back then? There wasn’t even a postal service to send out the invitations! Probably took 'em a month just to chop the trees to saw into planks to build the picnic tables for the feast!
Y’know, I’ve always wondered how they plowed and planted and weeded in those buckled shoes. Of all the sites I found, this one probably best illustrates clothing of the era. From what I found, the “Thanksgiving Pilgrim” costume we know so well is based on the formal Puritan dress common in Boston in the late 17th century; it was, according to what I found, primarily an urban fashion and meant to be more severe than the European fashions of the same time.
<---- Really likes roasted turkey.
