Thanksgiving

A New England Thanksgiving: Midday Detroit Lions NFL football and a Star Market turkey from Porter Square



Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

Midday meant the traditional Thanksgiving Thursday Detroit Lions NFL football game classic. The Detroit Heralds started the tradition in 1917 when they played against the Canton Bulldogs in a 7-0 loss. The Heralds played again in 1920. then the short-lived Detroit Tigers football team played the Chicago Staleys in 1921. The Detroit Panthers played in 1925 and 1926, and the Detroit Wolverines played in 1928. Thanksgiving football in Detroit has been happening for more than a century. Detroit held its first such matchup against the Chicago Bears in 1934 and has played on the holiday every year since 1945. 

In the 1980 game, the Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions 23-17.

My New England turkey came from Star Market in Porter Square, I believe, in adjacent Cambridge, although the exact geography is a bit fuzzy after 42 years, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family. While technically speaking, American Thanksgiving is a one-day holiday, like here in Canada, except on a Thursday instead of a Monday, for all intents and purposes it is part of a very long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.’”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago, there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon.

President Joe Biden pardoned two turkeys, Chocolate and Chip, on Monday as he discharged the presidential duty of the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardon.

“The votes are in, they’ve been counted and verified, no ballot stuffing, no fowl play. The only red wave this season is going to be if German Shepherd Commander knocks over the cranberry sauce,” Biden told an audience on the White House South Lawn.

President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks was the origin for the pardoning ceremony, according to the White House Historical Association, a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1961 by First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy with a mission to protect, preserve, and provide public access to the rich history of America’s Executive Mansion.

Reports of turkeys as gifts to American presidents can be traced to the 1870s, when Rhode Island poultry dealer Horace Vose began sending well fed birds to the White House. The First Families did not always feast upon Vose’s turkeys, but the yearly offering gained his farm widespread publicity and became a veritable institution at the White House. At Thanksgiving 1913, a turkey-come-lately from Kentucky shared a few minutes of fame with the fine-feathered Rhode Islander. Soon after, in December, Horace Vose died, thus ending an era.

By 1914, the opportunity to give a turkey to a president was open to everyone, and poultry gifts were frequently touched with patriotism, partisanship, and glee. In 1921, an American Legion post furnished bunting for the crate of a gobbler en route from Mississippi to Washington, while a Harding Girls Club in Chicago outfitted a turkey as a flying ace, complete with goggles. First Lady Grace Coolidge accepted a turkey from a Vermont Girl Scout in 1925. The turkey gifts had become established as a national symbol of good cheer.

With animal rights activists picketing nearby, President George H.W. Bush quipped “‘Reprieve,’ ‘keep him going,’ or ‘pardon’: it’s all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn’t end up on the president’s holiday table.”

Recently, White House mythmakers have claimed that President Harry S. Truman began the tradition of “pardoning” a turkey. However, the Truman Library & Museum disputes the notion that he was the first to do so. The focus on Truman stems from his being the first president to receive a turkey from the Poultry and Egg National Board and the National Turkey Federation. From September to November 1947, announcements of the government encouraging “poultryless Thursdays” grabbed national headlines. Outrage from homemakers, restaurant owners, and the poultry industry was palpable in Washington. This came to a head when the poultry industry pointed out that the upcoming Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day, the three big turkey holidays, happened to fall on Thursday. The effort was deflated in time for Thanksgiving, but not before poultry growers had sent crates of live chickens— “Hens for Harry”— to the White House in protest. The turkey they presented to President Truman that December promoted the poultry industry and established an annual news niche that endures today.

While 1947 was the beginning of the official turkey presentation from the poultry industry, the turkey pardon remained a sporadic tradition. In December 1948, Truman accepted two turkeys and remarked that they would “come in handy” for Christmas dinner. There was clearly no plan for these birds to receive a presidential pardon. The Washington Post used both “pardon” and “reprieve” in a 1963 article in which President Kennedy said of the turkey, “Let’s keep him going.” During the latter years of the Nixon presidency, Patricia Nixon accepted the turkeys on behalf of the President and in 1973 sent the bird to the Oxon Hill Children’s Farm.

A piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour in November 2014 also offered a comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

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Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving trivia to feast on

Looking back recently at some old newspaper columns and blog posts, I was a bit surprised to realize how much I’ve written over the years about both Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving. I don’t write about the kick-off to turkey-gobbling season every fall, but many I do.

Most of my Thanksgiving celebrations have been in Canada, but twice in the 1980s I found myself living in the United States for Thanksgiving on Thursdays. I was living in West Somerville, Massachusetts (home of the now gone but never forgotten legendary Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell on Elm Street in Davis Square, where the ice cream was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer) in 1980, and in 1989, in East Durham, North Carolina.

My New England turkey came from Star Market, while I believe Food Lion was my likely turkey supplier of choice in North Carolina at the other end of the decade in 1989. In New England, Star Market was something of a grocery story chain legend (New England has a lot legends). Started by Stephen P. Mugar in 1915, Star Market by 1980 was owned by Jewel-Osco, another supermarket chain headquartered in Itasca, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. The Star Market I shopped at in Cambridge, I believe, was in a kind of redlined area for grocery stores, so neighbourhood supermarkets were few and far between.

Food Lion for its part had begun in 1957 as a one-store operation in Salisbury, North Carolina, under the name Food Town and was founded by Ralph W. Ketner.

Canadian Thanksgiving, eh? February, April, May, June, October, November: A very moveable feast historically.

But in more recent, years Thanksgiving, if you’re in Canada, has meant celebrating on a Monday, more specifically, the second Monday of October since Jan. 31, 1957. Although Thanksgiving falls on a Monday, many Canadians have their dinner and family get-togethers the day before on the Sunday. While the second Monday of October has been the fixed official Canadian Thanksgiving date for the last 62 years, such has not always been the case. Historically, up until 1957, the Thanksgiving holiday – and even the word “holiday” might be bracketed by quotation marks – was somewhat of a moveable feast, and in that way not dissimilar to the American Thanksgiving holiday, which, while it falls later than our annual harvest observance, also moved around until 1957 when it began to be consistently celebrated on the the fourth Thursday in November across the United States.

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of Canada East and Canada West, to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

An official observance, however, isn’t quite synonymous being an official holiday. Thanksgiving is a statutory holiday across Canada, except for the Atlantic provinces of Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. However, Thanksgiving is a designated retail closing day in Nova Scotia. Just to be clear, if we’re talking turkey.

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Ice Cream, Popular Culture and Ideas

From Steve’s in Somerville, Massachusetts to Ben & Jerry’s in Burlington, Vermont, New Englanders have a single-minded zeal for super premium ice cream

stevesstation

WhiteMountainFreezerchunkey

It has now been more than 30 years since I lived in the Boston area but Boston stays with you forever.

I lived in West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, which is a few blocks east, if I’ve recalled my geography correctly, of the Cambridge line and Massachusetts Avenue, and just south of Tufts University and the Medford and Arlington boundaries. Somerville is where I discovered Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell seven years earlier on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville in 1973, which was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer, making for a ice cream based on a low overrun, or the amount of air in the ice cream while freezing, with  “mix-ins” like Heath® Bar Crunch added at the counter. At the very center of the twin-blade dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer is a center blade turning clockwise while the other blade turns counter clockwise, which are in a canister that also turns clockwise. This triple-motion action mixes and folds the ingredients completely creating smooth and creamy homemade ice cream.

What you need to know about northern New Englanders is they are crazy in love with their super premium ice cream. And I’m not shitting you on that, as a New Englander might well say in a way that sounds much less vulgar verbally in Massachusetts than it probably appears here in print. Some things do sort of get a bit lost in translation. To say I was surprised to discover how much residents of Massachusetts and Vermont in particular love their ice cream year-round would be a really big understatement. Up until then, I had lived all of my life in Southern Ontario in Canada, just a bit to the northwest side of the Adirondacks, and the climate I was used to was at most just a few degrees colder than much of northern New England. And, hey, I liked my Central Smith Creamery ice cream, found between Peterborough and Bridgenorth from what had started out as a farmer’s co-op in 1896, expanding to scooping ice cream in 1979, just fine, but they very sensibly, or so I thought anyway, closed their retail window at the creamery for the winter given the almost zero demand for a cone in December, January and February. Canadians, eh?

New Englanders are fanatics, however. Fanatical about ice cream any time of year; fanatical about their Bruins, as I discovered sitting in the “Gallery of the Gods” high up in the cheap seats in the old Boston Garden; and fanatical about the Red Sox, I also discovered sitting behind the “Green Monster,” the 37-foot, two-inch high left field wall at Fenway Park, which is only 310 feet from home plate.

I actually worked for a few weeks right in Harvard Square in Cambridge for yet another ice cream joint, Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor during the long ago summer of 1980 (no relation to Brigham’s briar pipes, founded by Roy Brigham in his pipe repair shop in Toronto in 1906), the legendary Boston ice cream shop founded in 1914 by Edward L. Brigham. Sadly, neither Steve’s or Brigham’s has their ice cream parlor businesses in the Boston area any longer, although you can still find tubs of ice cream distributed under their brand in New England grocery stores, or at least so I’m given to understand.

I can’t remember now if we sold burgers at Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor in Harvard Square and actually had grill cooks or just ice cream and pop, but what I recall most was it was a cultural introduction to those small but significant differences between Canadians and Americans. I used to actually work the cash and give customers their orders on occasion.

Around the Boston area the most common term used for chocolate sprinkles on ice cream is “jimmies,” which I got used to more or less soon enough. But every time someone bought a cold drink in one of those waxed cups, I’d ask if they wanted a lid with it. Invariably they would look happily stunned, while my co-workers would just look plain stunned. A “lid” was a drug term not much used in Southern Ontario at the time but apparently universally used in Massachusetts in 1980 for either an ounce or gram of marijuana, depending who you ask for the history of the measurement (which some say relates to coffee cans). “Do you want a lid with it?” made me a very popular Brigham’s employee during my brief tenure in Harvard Square.

Ice cream is the stuff of legend in New England. And no ice cream scoopers have been more legendary than Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenberg (a.k.a  Ben & Jerry). Their story of meeting in Grade 7 gym class in 1963 at Merrick Avenue Junior High School, as two chubby kids who liked to eat and disliked running track, while growing up in suburban Long Island, New York – and then in their mid-20s, after Greenberg had been rejected from some 20 medical schools and was not content to work as a lab technician – splitting the cost of a $5 Pennsylvania State University correspondence course in ice cream-making with Cohen, so that on Saturday, May 5, 1978, with $12,000 scraped together from loans and savings, they opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont, has been told now so often for so long, it is as smooth and as well crafted, as, well, a pint of Chunky Monkey Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.  In 1980, they were still showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.

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