Month: November 2012

The Week explores the history of the "holiday":

In the '50s, people running factories started referring to the day after Thanksgiving as "Black Friday" because so many employees failed to show up for work. In the early '60s, Philadelphia police started using the term to refer to the onslaught of jaywalking shoppers that converged on the downtown. By the '70s, the name was more widely used to connote the kick-off of holiday shopping, but still bore negative connotations. It only took on a positive ring in the '80s, when some shop owners pointed out that the profitable, big, post-Thanksgiving rush put "black ink" on their balance sheets for the first time of the year. 

A reader writes:

My 81-year-old father, a retired Marine and lifelong straight-ticket Republican, has gone through an amazing shift over the last four years.  When McCain had named Palin as his running mate, my dad defended the choice because she "was a fighter and everyone underestimates her".  Four years ago he quaked in his boots and railed against Obama, who "was going to take everybody’s guns away" and was responsible for the shortage in ammunition (part of the plot to take away guns was his plan to remove ammo from the store shelves).  Obama didn’t have the experience to end the wars.  Obama wouldn’t be able to deal with the economy.  Our country was going to hell in a handbasket with that man in charge.

This election?  Straight-ticket Democratic voter and big contributor to both Obama’s campaign and Claire McCaskill’s senatorial campaign against Todd Akin.  As we would drive by homes where Akin or Romney yard signs were displayed, he’d say, "There’s a lot of crazy people in this neighborhood".  A month ago my mother called me, worried that my father had become too militantly Democratic and wished he would settle down just a little bit in his zeal. We can sit down as a family and intelligently discuss politics, and I can’t express how wonderful it is to share this with him for the first time in my life. 

To what do we attribute this change?  I believe it started with having multiple children, grandchildren and in-laws who didn’t have health insurance due to self-employment and the difficulty with getting an individual policy. 

My father worked 40 years in the government and always had wonderful insurance and a lot of security in terms of retirement, and I believe he wanted the same for all of his children and grandchildren.  He realized that the guns weren’t going away (he’s an avid skeet shooter), that the president was an intelligent man who approached the nation’s problems with calm, deliberate reasoning and an eye towards the greater good.  Dad paid attention to the obstructionism within Congress and was disgusted by these supposed "patriots" who were focused on preventing recovery.  Obama was bringing the soldiers back home, which was a huge deal to a man who saw far too much of the damage caused by war during his Vietnam stint.

It takes a lot to change a man’s position so enormously.  I’m more proud of my father than I have ever been and see him as a lesson to the Republican party.  If they are losing someone like him, how many more must there be?

Dorian Warren explains why he supports it:

Cole Stangler covers the protests:

OUR Walmart isn’t trying to push for union representation for Wal-Mart workers. The campaign is organizing behind a broad set of demands by building a network of allies and trying to pressure the company. “The fundamental difference is this isn’t a collective-bargaining organization, it’s a rights-based organization. At this point, there’s not a battle for a collective-bargaining agreement, there’s a battle to change the company,” [Dan Schlademan, director of Making Change at Walmart] said of OUR Walmart. “All the other things that are the heart and soul of the labor movement and of workers’ organizing are there, which is collective action, workers pulling their resources together so they have a bigger voice, and utilizing the public to educate and build power to change the company."

Winston Ross adds: 

Walmart has proved itself a company that cares about its reputation, says Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. …  Walmart has raised wages in recent years in response to worker discontent, Lichtenstein said. …"Walmart never likes to say they respond to pressure, but in fact they do," Lichtenstein said. "This will make them think twice before they do things like cut back on the health plan."

A Walmart spokesman defends his company here. 

Dana Gunder notes that "Americans will toss a whopping $282 million of uneaten turkey into the trash this Thanksgiving, contributing to the $165 billion in uneaten food Americans waste every year":

[W]e’ll be throwing away about 204 million pounds of that meat and about 1 million tons of CO2 and 105 billion gallons of water with it. Per pound, the resources needed to produce that turkey are equivalent to driving your car 11 miles and taking a 130-minute shower (at 4 gallons/minute).

Omaha, Nebraska, 12.15 pm

But if you must shop today, Farhad Manjoo has some advice:

The cheapest Kindle sells for $69, and you can pick up the entry-level Nook this week for $49 (it usually sells for $99). But I’d advise against getting either one of these cheapies. That’s because we’ve recently seen a revolutionary feature in more advanced e-readers: Illuminated screens that allow you to read your device in the dark. You can see the light in the Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight or the Kindle Paperwhite, which both sell for $119. (You’re not likely to find any Black Friday discounts on these.)

Why am I telling you to pay $70 more for a small lamp inside your reader? Because I think illumination makes e-readers perfect.

For years, my main beef with these devices was that I couldn’t read them in the dark. I’ve heard the same complaint from readers. Sure, you can always use a book light, but I’ve noticed they create a distracting glare around the e-reader’s display—defeating the main feature of these devices’ E-Ink screens, the fact that they’re easy on the eyes. The illuminated Nook and Kindle provide a beautiful, glare-free, even light that appears to emanate from within the page. The light is just bright enough to allow you to read, without being so bright as to cause eyestrain (as LCD screens do).

If you can’t shell out $119, you can always wait—illuminated e-readers are sure to be cheaper next year. But if you buy a cheap, unlit e-reader to save a buck, you’re sure to find yourself in the dark.

Rocio Fernandez greets her grandson Max Bazsn, 7, as families reunite at National Airport for Thanksgiving. By Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

Rachel Shukert, who is Jewish, nominates Thanksgiving to replace Christmas as America's biggest holiday:

Religious holidays have their place, and that’s in the homes of the adherents of that religion. It’s when a religious holiday aims for a universality, that, by definition it cannot have, that we have a problem. No matter how much we spin Christmas as a "winter festival" with pagan origins, the first six letters of its name are impossible to shake, a proverbial nail through the palm.

Why Thanksgiving is better:

It’s a nice long weekend and usually not too cold, there are no religious services of any kind required, and you get to start drinking and eating at 3:00 in the afternoon, which is always the time that everyone is hungriest anyway. Its message of thanks is easy to get behind. "We can’t have a tree because we don’t believe in Jesus," my mother used to say to me, but it’s pretty hard to argue with being grateful that Grandma’s cataract surgery went so well or that they finally made a movie of Les Misérables.

Akim Reinhardt debunks some of the tales behind our "modern, secular, national creation story": One example:

Any meal the Puritans might have shared with the Wampanoags was not the first
American Thanksgiving. Based on European harvest-home feasts, not Indian rituals, earlier examples include: 1578, Martin Forshiber’s Thanksgiving feast after his third Atlantic crossing to Canada;1598, Don Juan de Onate’s Thanksgiving feast on the banks of the Rio Grande after crossing the Mexican desert and before beginning his terroristic campaign to subdue the Pueblos;1606, Samuel de Champlain’s harvest feast in Quebec; 1619, Thanksgiving feast at Berkeley Plantation on the Chesapeake, with the Virginia Company decreeing that day (December 4) an annual holiday.

But, like any creation myth, the narrative serves a purpose:

Through it, [Americans] tell themselves that the United States was founded upon liberty and friendship.  The Puritans were seeking freedom.  The Indians welcomed and helped them.  Things might have gotten very messy later on, but it all began with the best of intentions on both sides. … After all, that’s a lot more comforting than telling yourself it began in a firmament of religious zealotry, colonialism, slavery, and genocide.

In a Smithsonian article republished from last year, Megan Gambino itemized the first Thanksgiving menu:

Turkey was not the centerpiece of the meal, as it is today, explains [foodways culinarian at Plimoth Plantation Kathleen] Wall. Though it is possible the colonists and American Indians cooked wild turkey, she suspects that goose or duck was the wildfowl of choice. In her research, she has found that swan and passenger pigeons would have been available as well. … It is possible that the birds were stuffed, though probably not with bread. (Bread, made from maize not wheat, was likely a part of the meal, but exactly how it was made is unknown.) The Pilgrims instead stuffed birds with chunks of onion and herbs. "There is a wonderful stuffing for goose in the 17th-century that is just shelled chestnuts," says Wall. "I am thinking of that right now, and it is sounding very nice."

(Vintage postcard from Flickr user riptheskull)

Hesham Hassaballa, an American Muslim, ponders God's attributes and the ways we try to grasp something of God's nature in human language:

God is beyond an all-encompassing description. There is no way I can fit the Lord God into a box and say for sure, "This is God." Having said that, in His infinite Mercy and Compassion for us, our Creator has sought to describe Himself in the scripture so that the inherently imperfect human mind can begin to comprehend what is truly an Awesome God. Thus, the "99 Names of God" come to mind.

One of those 99 names? "The Appreciative":

"Every day should be Thanksgiving." I have heard some Muslims say this to me in an effort to persuade me that Muslims should not celebrate Thanksgiving because it is a "non-Muslim" holiday. While I do not subscribe to this view, I do agree that every day should be Thanksgiving. Each and every day, I must celebrate the beautiful fact that God is al Shakur, or the Appreciative. And I do so by following the commands of God to the best of my ability. And, if I do that, God told me that He will shower his blessings upon me because He is "most appreciative, most clement."