Number 4. Triple A dot com. Nearly 80 million Americans expected to travel.
Whether driving or flying, or taking the road to Grandmother’s house where the horse knows the way to pull the sleigh, 25% of us are away from home this weekend. That probably means another quarter of us have company, and we get to hear Uncle Snodgrass tell us once again about the time he lost his toes in the threshing machine.
Or maybe that’s just my own family lore. Which apparently made an impression on me.
The growth from 77.8 million travelers in 2019 to 79.8 million this year represents an annual growth rate of 1/2 of 1 percent per year, according to my new digital BFF ChatGPT. (ChatGPT, by the way, has a math accuracy rate that is either 98% or 2%, depending on when you ask it. Now THAT is a giant leap forward for technology.)
The fairly flat trend in increased Thanksgiving travel does not sound like a huge explosion of family reconnectionalism. If I were a little brighter and more motivated I could assert that the causes have to do with lower birth rates, disintegrating families, tighter economics or political antagonism. But that’s for another time.
Today, I’m on holiday.
There is a silver lining to this predictable one-day-a-year travel phenomenon. Just think of all those vacant homes this weekend, ripe for the picking. With a fourth of us on the road, and most of the remainder watching Bears, Lions, Giants and Cowboys instead of the neighbor’s house, as we had promised, thieves should have great opportunities for personal enrichment.
I expect an upswing in sales next week for companies like Simply Safe and Ring Doorbell. Where’s Macaulay Culkin when you need him?
Number 3. Finder dot com. $983 million to be spent on turkeys.
Something like 293 million of us were expected to eat part of a turkey yesterday. That amounts to 80% of the American population. Together, we shared 46 million bird carcasses, which means we each got something like 15% of a bird.
Somewhere lost in the shuffle are the approximately 75 million of us who ate ham. Turkeys and pigs are our favorites for this holiday.
Birds commercially raised for the table has become a hugely industrialized process. The critters live in conditions that would make most of us turn vegetarian if we saw it up close, but that has not kept us from spending nearly a billion dollars on turkey this year. Interestingly, that is down 30% from last year’s total spend. Which probably has more to do with the economy than with our culinary appetite.
Another fun fact: The grocery store cost of a Thanksgiving turkey was $17 in 2010. This year it is over $30, an 80% increase. Most of that price jump came in the 2 years from 2020 to 2022.
So I hope you did your share yesterday. The rest of your 1/7 of a bird you can finish off in sandwiches this weekend after Uncle Snodgrass goes home.
Number 2. US Adult Literacy dot com. Why Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving.
According to this article (and many others) the Pilgrims who celebrated a feast with the Wampanoag Indians in 1621 probably did not have turkey on the menu. Instead, they ate deer (venison) and fish, plus corn and vegetables. If they had fowl at all, it was probably duck or geese.
Over the next 150 years, dinner-table turkey grew in popularity. When George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving in 1789, turkey was one of the main offerings on the table. Probably this is because they were plentiful in the northeast, and they couldn’t fly. (Les Nessman should have paid attention to that lesson in grade school history.) Grounded birds are easier to nail with a blunderbuss, when reloading would take some time. Make the first shot count.
It was Sarah Josepha Hale’s 1827 novel Northwood that popularized Thanksgiving as a national holiday. In her book, she described the New England celebration in detail and also wrote of it in Godey’s Lady’s Book.
By 1863, Abraham Lincoln made it an official national day, which probably had much to do with Civil War strategy and the extremely bloody Battle of Gettysburg 6 months earlier.
Number 1. ABC News. Biden pardons Peach and Blossom at White House.
In 1963, JFK was presented with a turkey in a White House Rose Garden ceremony. The presidential words, “Let’s keep him going,” were interpreted by a delighted press corps as a formal pardon. The idea caught on, and most years since then a turkey has been pardoned by the president or a first lady.
The ceremony was formalized by Bush 41 in 1989 when a formal pardon was issued.
An historical note should not be missed. The November 19, 1963, Rose Garden ceremony occurred exactly 3 days before John F. Kennedy became the 4th president in American history to be assassinated.
Now that I have spoiled the mood, on to the story.
This year, President Biden was presented with Peach and Blossom, two 7-month-old Minnesota birds who each weigh about 40 lbs. That means, of course, they can barely stand by themselves, having been treated all their short lives on a diet and in conditions conducive to nothing but weight gain.
Which may be more reflective of our abundant American society than we would like to contemplate.
All that notwithstanding, I hope you have enjoyed your holiday and that you are looking forward to finishing the year with hope and optimism. Put up with Uncle Snodgrass. He won’t be around forever, and you will have to take his place, forcing the next generations to endure your own stories of times gone by.
Blessings on your house this weekend!
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