I LOVED Garfield when I was a kid, so of course Lou Rawls is part of the soundtrack of my childhood. He did some fabulous holiday tunes. I want this one to be longer.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Posts tagged Thanksgiviing
Happy Franksgiving
During the depression, in times before stores could conscionably decorate for Christmas before Thanksgiving had passed, there was a November with five Thursdays. Thanksgiving had always been celebrated on the last Thursday of November. The last Thursday of this November was the 30th. That meant stores couldn’t ramp up for Christmas until December 1st. Worried that just 24 days of Christmas shopping would damage an already limping economy, the president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, announced that this year Thanksgiving would happen on the fourth Thursday.
FDR’s announcement was met with confusion and consternation. Shopping wasn’t the only schedule that hinged on Thanksgiving, there were college football games and class registration. After FDR’s announcement the states were divided about how to enact the holiday. Some states gave a holiday on the fourth Thursday and some kept it on the last Thursday. A small handful of states gave two Thanksgiving holidays.
Radio hosts made merry about the confusion of when to celebrate Thanksgiving, and the whole hullabaloo was derided as Franksgiving. But don’t we always have Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November, I hear you ask? And yes. After a couple of years of Franksgiving confusion FDR make Thanksgiving a federal holiday that falls on the fourth Thursday. Most states then aligned their celebrations and rivalry football game scheduling fell in line. Up until the Franskgiving debacle, the holiday had been announced annually by the President.
Thanks to Christmas creep, the whole economic reasoning behind the idea seems ludicrous. But just imagine, an August, September, and October even without Christmas decorations in stores!
Holidays in Movies: Thanksgiving
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.’
Holiday food
Food is one of the primary ways that I celebrate the holidays and changing of the seasons. However, I cannot claim to be a truly seasonal eater.
I do find that having a dish that you make only once a year, or even once a month encourages me to forget. At which point I end up in a routine of making the same thing over and over. To help me get over this, I put together a holiday recipe zine a couple of years ago. It didn’t completely capture my repertoire at the time, and I have added dishes since, so this would be a good time to add to it, yeah? Perhaps I could expand it with my recipe series and my comic about cumin pumpkin.
The quintessential foods that whisper ‘holidays’ to me are:
- Cumin roasted pumpkin which is such a devil to make, I drew a comic.
- Kapusta, a warming cabbage stew that was always on the table at the Wilsey’s Christmas eve party, where my Dad took us every year.
- Ginger bread, cake, cookies, whatever
- Fruit cake
- Stuffing because I never make it any other year
- Green bean casserole, the canned way, but not with mushroom soup because that’s verboten in my house
What are your quintessential holiday foods?