My Future Thanksgiving Plans

 

Thanksgiving is just around the corner. And today on my blog, we're gonna discuss some future plans for Thanksgiving when I return. But first, I'm gonna talk about the brief history of this traditional holiday.

Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday in the United States, and Thanksgiving 2023 occurs on Thursday, November 23. In 1621, the Plymouth colonists from England and the Native American Wampanoag people shared an autumn harvest feast that is acknowledged as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies.

For more than two centuries, days of thanksgiving were celebrated by individual colonies and states. It wasn’t until 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, that President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to be held each November. But the holiday is not without controversy. Many Americans—including people of Native American ancestry—believe Thanksgiving celebrations mask the true history of oppression and bloodshed that underlies the relationship between European settlers and Native Americans.

In many American households, the Thanksgiving celebration has lost much of its original religious significance; instead, it now centers on cooking and sharing a bountiful meal with family and friends. Turkey, a Thanksgiving staple so ubiquitous it has become all but synonymous with the holiday, may or may not have been on offer when the Pilgrims hosted the inaugural feast in 1621. 

Today, however, nearly 90 percent of Americans eat the bird—whether roasted, baked or deep-fried—on Thanksgiving, according to the National Turkey Federation. Other traditional foods include stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Volunteering is a common Thanksgiving Day activity, and communities often hold food drives and host free dinners for the less fortunate.

Pilgrims held their second Thanksgiving celebration in 1623 to mark the end of a long drought that had threatened the year’s harvest and prompted Governor Bradford to call for a religious fast. Days of fasting and thanksgiving on an annual or occasional basis became common practice in other New England settlements as well. 

During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress designated one or more days of thanksgiving a year, and in 1789 George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by the national government of the United States; in it, he called upon Americans to express their gratitude for the happy conclusion to the country’s war of independence and the successful ratification of the U.S. Constitution. His successors John Adams and James Madison also designated days of thanks during their presidencies.

In fact, everyone we know who live in Lawrence celebrates Thanksgiving every year, including me. And if you haven't heard on Plymouth, Massachusetts, then maybe someday my family and I would like to visit there for a special time. My mom would love to take a look at the historical town and learn about the pilgrims who sailed the Mayflower. I even learned about that with a little help from Schoolhouse Rock.

Thanks, ABC.

Now have you ever heard of seeing Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade lately?

Dig this! Parades have also become an integral part of the holiday in cities and towns across the United States. Presented by Macy’s department store since 1924, New York City’s Thanksgiving Day parade is the largest and most famous, attracting some 2 to 3 million spectators along its 2.5-mile route and drawing an enormous television audience. It typically features marching bands, performers, elaborate floats conveying various celebrities and giant balloons shaped like cartoon characters. For anyone who's familiar with the parade, there was one that had the parade float for 'Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends'.

And in case you knew just now, we got rickrolled!

(My favorite part.)

Although the American concept of Thanksgiving developed in the colonies of New England, its roots can be traced both to Native Americans, as well as back to the other side of the Atlantic. 

Both the Separatists who came over on the Mayflower and the Puritans who arrived soon after brought with them a tradition of providential holidays—days of fasting during difficult or pivotal moments and days of feasting and celebration to thank God in times of plenty.

As an annual celebration of the harvest and its bounty, moreover, Thanksgiving falls under a category of festivals that spans cultures, continents and millennia. In ancient times, the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans feasted and paid tribute to their gods after the fall harvest. Thanksgiving also bears a resemblance to the ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. 

Finally, historians have noted that Native Americans had a rich tradition of commemorating the fall harvest with feasting and merrymaking long before Europeans set foot on America's shores.

Did you know that Pumpkin pie was a staple on New England Thanksgiving tables as far back as the turn of the 18th century? Legend has it that the Connecticut town of Colchester postponed its Thanksgiving feast for a week in 1705 due to a molasses shortage. There could simply be no Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie.

Did you also know that Cranberries were eaten by Native Americans and used as a potent red dye, but sweetened cranberry relish was almost certainly not on the first Thanksgiving table? The pilgrims had long exhausted their sugar supply by November 1621. Marcus Urann canned the first jellied cranberry sauce in 1912 and eventually founded the cranberry growers cooperative known as Ocean Spray.

Plus, fun fact is that in 1953, an employee at C.A. Swanson & Sons overestimated demand for Thanksgiving turkey and the company was left with some 260 tons of extra frozen birds. As a solution, Smithsonian reports, a Swanson salesman ordered 5,000 aluminum trays, devised a turkey meal and recruited an assembly line of workers to compile what would become the first TV tray dinners. A culinary hit was born. In the first full year of production, 1954, the company sold 10 million turkey TV tray dinners.

Now you know!

Now here are my future plans for Thanksgiving. First off, when my family and I get ourselves planned for Thanksgiving, my dad can come get me and he'll take me to their house in Kansas City. I can even have my friends over. Second, if I'm spending Thanksgiving in Lawrence Kansas once again, I can surprise them for a special dinner here at Free State High School just like old times. Or if I can make a surprise visit to the Fitzmorris house, I can hang out with them and have some dinner with them earlier. Or maybe if I can participate in a special Thanksgiving event in Best Buddies, that would be really cool to enjoy too. And speaking of Best Buddies in Thanksgiving, I've been thinking about maybe making up a funny play about the history of Thanksgiving with a little help from Lois Orth-Lopes, Stephanie Harsin, and Darrell Andrew along with some kids who wanna participate here at the Lawrence Arts Center or at the KU Lied Center. It'll be just like the time I did that in Cordley. Ahh, good times.

I'm also thinking about maybe my family and I might be planning a special trip to downtown Plymouth Massachusetts for the whole week. We would learn about the Mayflower, visit a couple museums like the Plimoth Patuxet Museums, the Pilgrim Hall Museum, and the Fuller Craft Museum, go on a fishing and whale watching tour or another boat excursion at Monomoy Island just like in Norway, go out to eat, go bowling and go shopping. We can even plan a trip to Edaville Theme Park. It's a classic theme park here in Carver with a New England theme. Just to be sure. I'll bet my mom would love that idea for the next trip, maybe while we're visiting Boston for the first time. What do you think of that?

If you haven't heard of Plymouth Massachusetts yet, here's a picture of it.

Now for my next future Thanksgiving plan. What if I can get everybody together with me here in Lawrence and put together a special Thanksgiving parade from downtown all the way to Free State. My friend Mr. Andrew would really like to help me out on the perfect Thanksgiving parade float together. For my idea on that one, the float would have to be a fall theme with a turkey on it. Then it would have to play some various music so that they can see us as we wave at them. And maybe I can hand out Laffy Taffy candy or some caramels to the kids. That would be a really cool idea to do in the future, won't it. Booyah! So as I come in to make this parade float a success, I help them create it. And then when it's all done, I can take a picture of it. It'll be perfect for this special traditional holiday. If I were to pick some music to play on that float for the parade, I would choose music from Thom Alexander and maybe some local music like the "Pie" song by Steve Mason. Yep, you guessed it alright! Ad infinitum! Why? Because I like it by the slice, even when it's 3.1415. Still it's nice! And wait a minute, I have the perfect idea for the future Thanksgiving downtown parade float. The Mayflower Boat Float! That's more than perfect! It's incredible! I gotta alert my friends back home about this. I think they're gonna love it!

My next idea for my future Thanksgiving is outdoor movie night with Eric and Jill. We’ll have movie night here at the backyard and at the hot tub. My choices for the Thanksgiving movie night are:

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving

Free Birds

We’re Back: A Dinosaur’s Story

Good Burger

A Thanksgiving Tale

Fantastic Mr. Fox

I’ll even bet a hundred percent that this next idea will be a big hit for next year’s holiday too. I wonder if I can plan this special movie night for anytime of the year, and not just Thanksgiving.

Believe it or not, I can’t wait for all of this to happen someday when I come back in the future ever since my family and I live the comfortable life. After Bluffton, I’m doing Lawrence again. But not just soon, and like I said before, it’ll be a while before we do that in the future. Well anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll be back again soon with the next blog to talk about. So in the meantime, have a happy Thanksgiving. See you all real soon!

P.S.  Don’t eat too much turkey, save some for leftovers.