You would think after a couple hundred years, with such a huge non-secular holiday like Thanksgiving, with family and friends gathering together, there would be at least a few old classics, a few new songs and some music to play to get you into the Thanksgiving mood.
The only song I can think of is that children’s song, “Over the river and through the woods…”, but even that isn’t exactly a song about turkeys roasting in the oven and pumpkin pies and is probably more of a Christmas song.
I just figure that most people in the US do something over Thanksgiving with friends and family, and you would think there would be a least a few traditional or new songs with a Thanksgiving theme. Do you know of any?
Well, there aren’t really many old, traditional songs for Halloween, or Easter, or Valentine’s Day, or really any holiday I can think of besides Christmas (or maybe the 4th of July, if you count songs that are patriotic in general rather than being specific to the day).
Adam Sandler’s Thanksgiving Song (“Love to eat turkey…”)
Christmas is a season, and there are lots of public events associate with it.
Thanksgiving is a one-off thing. A ginormous meal you have with your family, and that’s it. Nothing leading up to it. Maybe the National Anthem could count as we tend to watch a lot of football on that day, too!
Many hymns have been written about thanking God. Two often sung around this time are “Now Thank We All Our God” and “Come, Ye Thankful People Come”. The latter was sung by the Peanuts characters some years ago in a TV commercial. Brought a tear to my eye, believe it or not.
Plus Thanksgiving is really just a national holiday, while Christmas is a global one. Sure, a few other countries have one, but it’s their own national holiday. So we have several nation’s worth of different music traditions to get our classic songs from.
Yes! We sang that when I was a kid, too. Also “Come, ye thankful people come, raise the song of harvest home . . .”
You know the line “Sing praises to his name, he forgets not his own?” I thought that meant he would forget his own name if we didn’t keep singing praises to it.
While this has been appropriated by Thanksgiving and is now strongly associated with it, it was written to celebrate a military victory.
The linked article lists these songs for Thanksgiving:
“Come, Ye Thankful People, Come”
“For the Beauty of the Earth”
“Over the River and through the Woods”
“The Thanksgiving Song”
“We Gather Together”
“We Plough the Fields and Scatter”
“Alice’s Restaurant”
After attending my son’s Thanksgiving pageant this past week… I can safely say that there ARE Thanksgiving songs in existence. And you should be very grateful that you don’t hear them that often.
I was subjected to “Every Turkey Can Tango” “Super Turkey” “The Turkey Dance” “I’m Glad I’m Not A Turkey” and other timeless (?) classics that weren’t memorable enough for me to take note of the title.