The Boston Transcript is afraid, if all the states this year have Thanksgiving day on November 6, that “there may not be turkeys enough to go round.”
-November 21, 1868
The clergymen of Massachusetts are signing a petition to the Governor that the annual appointment of a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer has become a day of much license, disorder, and excess. They believe that the discontinuance of the custom would be for the public good.
-November 6, 1869
A man in Indiana was choked to death by a piece of beef on Thanksgiving Day, and his neighbors say it was a judgment on him for not eating turkey.
-January 2, 1869
A Deacon was in the habit of asking blessings of a most wearisome length. At Thanksgiving dinner, he was particularly wordy and had to pause to gain a fresh supply of breath and words. The Instant he stopped the pastor sat down and commenced rattling his knife and fork. The deacon, very much disconcerted opened one eye and, exclaimed, “I’m not through yet; I only hesitated.”
“Hesitated?!” replied the minister, “it’s no time to hesitate when a turkey’s cooling!
-May 21, 1859
We see it stated that on Thanksgiving Day in New York, several of the leading clergymen commented at length upon the increasing demoralization of that city — one going so far as to say that New York would suffer by a comparison with Sodom and Gomorrah.
We think this is rather too hard a sentence. There was only one good man in Sodom — there must be at least several thousand in New York, unless the church members there are all hypocrites.
-December 4, 1858
At East Lynn, Massachusetts, on Thanksgiving Day, a couple were married who had been engaged since 1817.
-December 21, 1872
A citizen of Elizabeth, NJ, went to the railroad station on Thanksgiving day to see his daughter off. Having secured a seat for her, he left the car and went round to her window to say a parting word. While he was walking out, his daughter left the seat to speak to a friend. At the same time, a prim-looking lady who occupied the seat with her moved up to the window. Unaware of the changes inside, our venerable friend hastily put his face up to the window and exclaimed: “one more kiss, sweet pet.”
In another instant the point of a blue cotton umbrella caught his seductive lips, accompanied by the passionate injunction: “Scat, you gray-headed wretch!”
-January 13, 1872
At one of the Wellsburg, OH, churches on Thanksgiving day, somebody quietly dropped a one-hundred-dollar bill in the plate, and the unknown donor had the satisfaction of hearing his hometown newspaper say that the gift was either a mistake or conscience money.
-February 4, 1871
A Chicago paper has made a list of casualties resulting from football games held on Thanksgiving day. The list contains one killed outright and 45 injured — in one case at least fatally. Beside the fatal injury, in which the body was badly crushed, one man was rendered delirious by a blow on the head. Another was badly hurt internally, another had an eye gouged out and a hip broken. In other cases, arms, ribs, and collarbones were indiscriminately shattered.
This is one day’s record for a game that people applaud who are horrified at the thought of the comparatively harmless bullfight.
-December 10, 1896
At Providence, RI, Thanksgiving ay, the newsboys and bootblacks were treated to a dinner, the prominent feature of which was a mammoth pudding, three feet long, two feet wide, and one foot deep, and containing, among other ingredients, fifty pounds of raisins and ten cans of milk.
-November 24, 1870
“Darling,” pleaded the college man, “won’t you please fix the day; I am simply dying for the moment when I can call you my own!”
“Very well,” replied his fiancée, “suppose we say Thanksgiving day.”
“Great Scott,” replied her lover, “are you crazy? That’s football day!”
-November 28, 1914
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