Celebrating holidays in my house means media saturation. That is, leading up to Halloween we watch all the Halloween movies, and leading up to Christmas, we watch all the Christmas movies, specials, and television shows. But Halloween and Christmas aren’t the only holidays around which you can structure your movie viewing.

Thanksgiving

• Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982): immensely enjoyable take on the legend of the Chicken Ranch. If Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds aren’t enough to sell it to you, then the in depth study in eighties lingerie should do it.
• Madman (1982): horror film taking place in a strange alternate reality where kids are sent off to a woodland camp for Thanksgiving break.
• Turkey Hollow (2015): broken family forcing themselves on a grudgingly hospitable distant relative? check. Sibling discord healed by adventure and danger? check. Monsters in the woods? check. Turkeys? check check check check check.
• Adams Family Values (1993): “Eat Me! Hey! It’s Thanksgiving day!”
• Blood Rage (1987): “That’s not cranberry sauce.” And, bonus, this horror movie is located in good old Florida.
• A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973): Charlie Brown is the holidays; any holiday.
• Charlie Brown Mayflower Voyagers (1988): part of the ‘This is America, Charlie Brown” series, but tacked on to the ‘Peanuts Holiday Collection’ without any other episodes.
• Garfield’s Thanksgiving (1989): I grew up on Garfield; I had merch; this is home for me.
• Martha Stewart’s Classic Thanksgiving (2005): from the Martha’s Holidays collection, because it is necessary to have a couple of hours worth of instruction on making that turkey.
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987): is an amazing movie featuring two amazing comedians that is sometimes too poignant to watch every year.
• The Boneyard (1991): An emotionally tortured psychic agrees to work on another missing child case only to be trapped in a mortuary with the detective she is helping. Yes, there is Thanksgiving. There is also Phyllis Diller.
• Smothers Brother’s Thanksgiving Special (1988): TV variety show specials were a staple ingredient of my childhood. This one comes complete with Gallagher and Kenny Rodgers.
• WKRP in Cincinnati “Turkeys Away” (1978): WKRP was an amazing show. This Thanksgiving episode was based on a real stunt by a radio station in Atlanta.
• Deadly Friend (1986): Genius teenage robotics and neurology student introduces his robotic creation, Bebe, to new friends. There is pumpkin carving and trick or treating, but there is also a full Thanksgiving dinner.
• The Mutilator (1984): A group of friends accompany Ed while he closes up his dad’s beach condo over ‘fall break.’