Wednesday, November 26, 2003
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Wednesday, November 26, 2003 |
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The origins of Thanksgiving By MICHAEL BOYLAN Thanksgiving is this week and, with leftovers, the holiday will stretch at least into the week before Christmas. In honor of this holiday, here are some interesting facts submitted to us by the Census Bureau. The first Thanksgiving took place in 1621 when the pilgrims had a three day feast to celebrate their first harvest after their first winter in North America. But did you know that the first Thanksgiving where the pilgrims resented having to host the meal each year was 1623. The Harvard Library has a journal from Jonathan Proctor, a farmer from Plymouth Plantation, in which he describes his wife, Elizabeth’s outburst, while preparing her dishes for the Thanksgiving meal. “Lousy savages,” howled Elizabeth, as she hurled the clay dish holding Frederick Castleton’s cranberries. “Would it be too much to ask that we go over to their dwelling for the Thanksgiving meal? Oh that’s right, they don’t have chairs or walls, or a table. They sure have lots of maize though. Plenty of that. Maybe they could make some nice dishes or utensils with their precious maize. You know it’s just corn, don’t you? Lousy, weird looking, corn.” I tried to calm Elizabeth down but she bristled at my touch and then told me that she’d be fine.” Thanksgiving continued to be a yearly tradition, with the pilgrims hosting most, if not all, of the celebrations. This was especially true as many of the Indians either moved west, got tricked out of their land or were wiped out. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as the National Day of Thanksgiving - this didn’t count for people in the south at the time as they had seceded from the union and were fighting the north in the Civil War. In fact Lincoln had hoped to lure the Confederates back to the Union with promises of turkey, yams, rolls and potatoes. In a speech from October of 1863, Lincoln told a crowd of dignitaries in Philadelphia that, “You can catch a lot more flies with sweet potatoes than you can with musket fire.” In 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November instead of the last Thursday in November as a way to promote holiday shopping. In secret files that have recently been declassified, Roosevelt also stated that Christmas decorations should be put up one day earlier each year, which has resulted in the current situation of having decorations in department stores right after Halloween. Some other fun facts from the Census Bureau have shed some light on Americans eating habits around Thanksgiving. For instance, 269 million turkeys are raised in the United States each year, which amounts to nearly one turkey for every U.S. resident. This is scary when you consider that there are at least a few million vegetarians and vegans out there. What happens to all of the leftover turkeys? It is also a bit odd to know that this figure is down one percent from 2002. I mean, that’s a lot of turkeys. What if it is all part of a secret government plan to have the world eat turkeys and then get drowsy and fall asleep, so that they can place spy cameras around the country or inject the populace with a mind control drug. Maybe the mind control drug is in the turkeys! Sorry. In 2002, the turkeys produced in the U.S. weighed 7.4 billion pounds and were valued at $2.7 billion. The average American consumed 13.8 pounds of turkey last year, with most of the turkey being eaten around Thanksgiving. Think about this though - you know you didn’t eat close to 14 pounds of turkey last year, so that means there were people out there who ate like 30 or 40 pounds of turkey to get that average up. Of course, there are people who eat turkey cold cuts a few times a month, but there has to be a few people out there who cook a turkey for themselves and maybe their six cats while they watch the Matlock marathon or “A Christmas Story” over and over again. What’s really interesting though is that the average number of pounds of turkey consumed each year in 1980 was 8.1 pounds. Now, more people eat ground turkey or turkey franks these days, but I have to think that Americans just want to supersize everything these days. Thanksgiving is typically a day when you don’t have to have most of your meals on the go and, when you can sit down and eat, you do. Also, it has become a day where gorging is allowed or excusable. I certainly plan on eating my fill of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, green beans, rolls, and pie. I figure I’ll just get gastric bypass surgery sometime next week. Next week’s column, Mike gets gastric bypass surgery.
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