I’ve read a good number of corrections and clarifications over the years in newspapers as a journalist. I daresay I’ve had to write a few myself. That’s the nature of the beast. But the correction appended Nov. 26 by New York Times editors to a Nov. 18 story headlined “The United States of Thanksgiving,” which overreached it turns out in scouring “the nation for recipes that evoke each of the 50 states (and D.C. and Puerto Rico)” takes the cake for both its length, reflecting the rather larger number of errors, and something unique in my experience as a reader. It was so mouthwatering it made me hungry just reading it.
As a former resident of North Carolina, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, all I can say is yum. Happy Thanksgiving to all north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. You can read the original New York Times story here at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/18/dining/thanksgiving-recipes-across-the-united-states.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
The correction appended the bottom of the story online reads:
“Correction: November 26, 2014
“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.
“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.
“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.
“And, finally, the label for the illustration for the nation’s capital misspelled the District of Columbia as Colombia.”
Much like Canadian Thanksgiving, which I wrote about last month (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/canadian-thanksgiving-eh-february-april-may-june-october-november-a-very-moveable-feast-historically/) our American cousins have an older and equally interesting Thanksgiving history of this very moveable feast in both countries.
In the United States, Thanksgiving is a more complex feast. 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.
Canadian Thanksgiving, or Jour de l’Action de grâce, by contrast is a somewhat more low-key affair.
While we do travel to visit family and many of us will sit down to eat turkey with family and friends, it’s nothing on the scale of the American experience.
Perhaps that’s because we have our Thanksgiving on a Monday at the end of a weekend, not on a Thursday at the beginning of a 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 (and which was on the shelf today I noticed) 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. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour yesterday offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook
Cheese, a 49-pound big boy born on July 4, with a height of 36 inches and a wingspan of 4½ feet, and a “strut style” described as “grand champion,” was this year’s recipient yesterday of a presidential pardon from U.S. President Barack Obama during the annual ceremony in the Grand Foyer of the White House. It was Obama’s sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief Wednesday at the White House. Cheese’s gobble was characterized as “loud, romantic, with a country ring to it.”
The annual tradition now sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House pardon ceremony.
This year’s duo was Mac and Cheese, but only Cheese got to ham it up before the cameras.
“I am here to announce what I’m sure will be the most talked about executive action this month,” President Obama said, his two daughters Sasha and Malia by his side. “Today, I’m taking an action fully within my legal authority, same taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, to spare lives of two turkeys — “Mac” and “Cheese” from a terrible and delicious fate.”
He added, “If you’re a turkey, and you’re named after a side dish, your chances of escaping today dinner are pretty low, so these guys beat the odds. … They’ll get to live out the rest of their days respectably at a Virginia estate. Some would call this amnesty, but there’s plenty of turkey to go around.”
Mac, also a male born on the Fourth of July this year, came in two pounds lighter than Cheese, tipping the scales at only 47 pounds. He also had a half-foot smaller wingspan of only four feet. His strut style was described as “feather-shaker.” Mac’s gobble was characterized as “rhythmic, melodious, with a touch of bluegrass.”
Mac and Cheese will be sent to a park in Leesburg, Virginia, a Washington suburb. The property has been used to grow turkeys in the past. The estate was owned by former Virginia Governor Westmoreland Davis, who raised hundreds of his own turkeys there in the 1930s and 1940s.
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