Interestingly, Thanksgiving has remained relatively unscathed as progressives try to remake the American calendar. Maybe they because don’t want to blow a four-day weekend.
I did have an oddball professor—it does sound redundant—35 years ago who protested the holiday by dining alone in the kitchen. It didn’t occur to him that no one minded.
“Thanksgiving is not a patriotic day, per se, but it is a day when we have some patriotic feelings,” Melanie Kirkpatrick, author of Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience, said in October at the Kirby Center maintained by Hillsdale College in our nation’s capital. “Not many countries have thanksgiving days and most of those are harvest festivals.”
In the course of her research, she read all of the presidential proclamations. The variations are interesting:
- President Reagan was the first president to mention the Indians; and
- Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to mention the pilgrims.
The book is worth it for the Thanksgiving trivia alone. For example:
- The term “Black Friday” that refers to the day after Thanksgiving when stores offer sales actually originated in Philadelphia after a post-holiday Army-Navy game when a reporter used it to describe a traffic jam in the city of brotherly love; and
- The first Thanksgiving meal likely consisted of venison, oysters and corn. That does sound good.
