Men's Guide to Women

This year 45,000,000 turkeys will bite the dust so that we may all be fat dumb and happy on the second to last Thursday of November, that being Thanksgiving of course. Thanksgiving is a wonderful time. I love it. I get a lot of time off, I get more home cooking than I get practically any other time of the year, nobody cares if I take an afternoon nap and I get to watch some great football.

As I sat down to extol what I liked about Thanksgiving I began to wonder where did this holiday come from and why do we celebrate it today. Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving in November? How did turkeys get added to the tradition? How did professional football come to be on Thanksgiving?

I sound like my kids. Questions, questions, questions…

Enough already. Let’s get to some answers.

As a kid I was always told we celebrate Thanksgiving because the pilgrims (founders of the Plymouth Colony in 1620) were starving, a bunch of Indians (more on the Wampanoag tribe) showed up and taught these starving half dead people how to farm, hunt and fish in that region. When the fall of 1621 came there was such a bounty of food that they celebrated with the Wampanoag Indians for three days.

Ta-Da! That is why we celebrate Thanksgiving today!

It seems like I remember giving a speech like that wearing a paper pilgrim hat with a big yellow paper buckle standing on a stage in elementary school with some kid walking around behind me in a turkey outfit.

Well that story is not how Thanksgiving came to be at all. In fact, it took one determined woman that all children unknowingly love to this day, two presidents, and a scrappy little football league to make Thanksgiving what it is today.

To clarify, all of the Pilgrim stuff mentioned above happened. What they did not tell us as kids was that half of the colony died that first winter, and that the pilgrims did not continue the celebration the following year. I guess that would make the hand traced turkey we all did as kids lose a little luster. They also did not eat turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce or any of the traditional items we have come to know as being part of the Thanksgiving meal.

The only thing we know for sure they ate was deer meat and wild foul (speculation says a goose. Not my speculations mind you, but the Pilgrim-sperts.) The foods that would have most likely been a part of the first celebration based on what would have plentiful at that time of year in the Plymouth would have been lobster, goose, duck, seal, eel and cod fish.

“Honey, will you carve the seal, please?”

“Sure, Honey. Who wants a flipper?”

That’s OK; I think I will stick with Grandma’s Death Valley turkey recipe.

The event itself was a one time three day festival not to give thanks for family, friends and really nice Wampanoag’s. It was a celebration of “We have enough food to last through the winter this year, we are not all going to die freezing our butts off in the cold with three square meals of snowballs every day till May. Yeah.”

Now that puts a different spin on things, but how does a determined woman loved by children come into the picture?

Glad you asked.

Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879) pictured here, is the woman we have to thank for Thanksgiving. As for me, never heard of her.

We all know Sara best for the poem “Mary had a Little Lamb” she wrote that was published in an 1830 book. Who knew? Not me.

It seems that Sara spent the better part of 40 years writing to Congress trying to get them to declare a national day of thanksgiving.

Finally in 1863, four months after the Unions victory in Gettysburg (US Civil War for those who have long sense purged your historical brain cells), President Abraham Lincoln established the holiday on the last Thursday in November.

President Roosevelt moved the holiday up one week under pressure from retailers wanting to maximize the Christmas shopping window. The White House got a ton of hate mail on the subject. See some of the real letters here Letter 1, Letter 2, Letter 3, Letter 4. The people most hurt by the move, don’t laugh, were the calendar makers as they were printed two years in advance.

The National Football League played their first Thanksgiving Day game in 1920. The Detroit Lions became a staple of the Thanksgiving Day games in 1934 (Except for the 1939 and 1940 season.) The Dallas Cowboys became a permanent part of the day’s festivities in 1966. To see a list of every NFL game played on Thanksgiving Day, click here.  For a complete history of Thanksgiving and the NFL click here.

Congress settled the issue December 26, 1941 by permanently setting the date as the fourth Thursday in November.

The part of this story that is the hardest to believe is the fact that the US Congress was working on December 26, 1941 at all, let alone passing some legislation.

So this year as you wow your family with this Thanksgiving trivia, do not forget to give thanks to the Wampanoag’s, if for no other reason than their name is fun to say, Sarah Hale, Honest Abe, and FDR.

Without them, your butt would be at work on Thursday eating a ham sandwich for lunch, trying not to get caught napping in your chair as you dream of NFL football on Sunday.

Here is some additional Thanksgiving trivia to wrap things up. I like the last one, it reminds me of my teenage years.

• The long fleshy skin that hangs over a turkey's beak is called a snood.
• Male turkeys are nicknamed "toms" while females are called "hens."
• When turkeys reach maturity they can have as many as 3,500 feathers!
• Faster than a speeding bullet--Wild turkeys can run up to 55 miles an hour!
• The color of a wild turkey's naked head and neck area can change blue when mating.