Turkeys, family, and football: Great articles about Thanksgiving.
Wild turkeys, crazy relatives, and beloved rituals.
Is there a way to keep the Black Friday crowds safe?
The origins of the term Black Friday are obscure. Some think that it was first used by the police in Philadelphia to describe the snarled traffic and sidewalk hassles that came with the day after Thanksgiving and crowds arriving for the city’s annual Army-Navy game. Others have defined Black Friday as the day that merchants’ balance sheets crossed over into the black. Either way, it is now a de-facto national shopping holiday. On TV, images of people racing through the aisles of stores for sale-priced items, in a sort of American Pamplona, have become as much a part of the day after Thanksgiving as leftovers. Shoppers get discounts, programmers get some lively content for a slow news day, and retailers get free publicity: a good deal for everyone, except for the clerks who have to work that day, breaking up fights among shoppers and cleaning up the mess left behind.
How science changed our holiday feast.
The history of the first Thanksgiving: The Indians who first feasted with the English colonists were far more sophisticated than you were taught in school. But that wasn’t enough to save them.
All the while, Bradford wrote, Tisquantum “sought his own ends and played his own game.” Covertly he tried to persuade other Wampanoag that he could better protect them against the Narragansett than Massasoit. In case of attack, Tisquantum claimed, he could respond with as many Indian troops—plus the Pilgrims. To advance his case, Tisquantum told other Indians that the foreigners had “buried in the ground” a cache of the agent that had caused the epidemic and that he could manipulate them into unleashing it.
A Thanksgiving lesson in forgiveness.
For many people, Thanksgiving is about bringing together family and friends; for some, it is centered around the ancient autumnal harvest festival; for others, it is an opportunity to count and express our most precious blessings; for yet others, it is a holiday devoted to copious amounts of football and alcohol. I believe deeply in all these versions, but for me Thanksgiving is very much about the pardoning of turkeys. The tradition of the presidential turkey pardon is wonderfully rife with distortion, ambiguity, and error—as all good stories should be—but what is most perplexing about this bizarre ritual is our uncertainty about its origins.
In a St. Louis suburb, the Turkey Day high school football game is more than just an old-fashioned rivalry.
There are places in America where football is taken more seriously, and there are Thanksgiving Day high school football rivalries that are older than the 96-year-old series between Webster Groves and Kirkwood (box, page 82), but nowhere is the tradition so ingrained in the lives of generations of two communities, and nowhere is it more redolent of America’s all-but-extinct small-town culture. Turkey Day has featured the sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of players who battled for the black-and-orange-togged Statesmen or the red-and-white Pioneers. The local radio station, KFNS, sells tens of thousands of dollars in advertising for its broadcast of the event. Shops and restaurants cater to the football crowds and the hundreds of family reunions the game prompts every year. The friendly rivalry shapes relationships among the two towns’ residents all year round, and not just among the teenagers. Turkey Day is the cornerstone of the two communities’ identities.