Plan early, because there’s much more than Turkey Day!
“Let the gratitude you feel on Thanksgiving spill over into Giving Tuesday—and help us reimagine a world built upon shared humanity and generosity.”
Annual reminder from the GivingTuesday movement
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 28: As November begins, are you mainly focused on planning a menu—and perhaps counting heads—for your family’s Thanksgiving dinner? Remember there’s a whole lot more on the calendar clustered around American Thanksgiving. A nearly week-long host of themes, events and cultural milestones are about to cascade across our communities nationwide.
10 Annual Thanksgiving-related events
Pre-Thanksgiving-dinner Turkey Trots are held nationwide for fun and often for charitable causes. As this custom has evolved, the lengths have shortened to allow more folks to take part in these fun family oriented events. But, this is no recent fad. The oldest continuously held annual footrace in America is the Buffalo Turkey Trot, where funds go to support the YMCA.
Community Thanksgiving Services once were more popular nationwide, but the numbers of these events have declined in recent years. Hoping to organize something yourself, this year? Depending on your religious affiliation, search online for Thanksgiving resources and you’re likely to find lots of ideas for organizing a local event. For example, Tricia Brown posted this list of Thanksgiving-church-related ideas for the United Methodist Church’s national website. The Calvin Institute of Christian Worship also has a helpful list of Thanksgiving-service-planning ideas.
Remembering Displaced Native American communities. If you are interested in these events, check local news media in early November and, also, determine if regional Native communities welcome outside participation in their events. These annual traditions are sometimes listed under phrases such as Nation Day of Mourning or Unthanksgiving Day.
Parades continue to be popular on and around Thanksgiving—many of them focused on welcoming the Christmas season. In fact, Wikipedia’s U.S. index of these events is called “Christmas and holiday season parades” so the list is a mixed bag of everything from “homecomings” to local Christmas festivals.
Football on Thanksgiving is a tradition that stretches way back into the 1800s, just after the Civil War. Wikipedia says the first such holiday game “took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Thanksgiving Day of 1869, less than two weeks after Rutgers defeated Princeton in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in what is widely recognized as the first intercollegiate football game in the United States, and only six years after Abraham Lincoln declared the first fixed national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863.”
Thanksgiving television specials aren’t what they once were, now that “streaming” services have transformed television into a 24/7/365 matter of simply choosing what you want to see—whenever you want to see it. However, if you’re curious about the countless Thanksgiving-themed gems that have been broadcast, check out Wikipedia’s
List of Thanksgiving television specials You might re-discover a classic you’ll want to check out via streaming this year.
Black Friday as a semi-official kick off to the Christmas shopping season is both praised and criticized by American consumers—but, like those turkey trots, it’s not a new custom: This has been part of American culture for nearly a century and Thanksgiving-themed Christmas shopping was an especially important campaign during the Great Depression to try to prop up the sagging U.S. economy. Clearly the idea is spreading, though. In 2015, Amazon launched a second related annual event: “Black Friday in July.”
Small Business Saturday, a campaign to redirect shoppers from the giant retailers’ Black Friday “specials” into more “local” shops is not as well known. One reason for its lower profile is that the idea started as an ad campaign launched by American Express, which trademarked the name “Small Business Saturday.”
Cyber Monday is an e-commerce campaign focused on the Monday after Thanksiving.
Giving Tuesday is the last of these Thanksgiving-related events—popular enough now that it warrants its own extensive Wikipedia page.
Want to build momentum for one of these events? There are associated hash tags to share with friends across your preferred social media accounts. Or, this year, you could simply urge friends on social media to start following www.ReadTheSpirit.com for weekly updates of good news and, of course, information about upcoming holidays and festivals.
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