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A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Happy Thanksgiving! In this post, we’ll take a look at a set of interesting photos from the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division. They depict a custom most people nowadays don’t know much about: Thanksgiving masking. Thanksgiving maskers, like trick-or-treaters on contemporary Halloween, used to go door to door, begging for handouts. They also …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Festive Foods Podcast in Time for Thanksgiving

Posted by: Stephen Winick

That’s right, Episode Two of the Folklife Today Podcast is ready for listening! Find it at this page on the Library’s website, or on iTunes, or with your usual podcatcher. Get your podcast here!   This blog post provides more background for the stories and the audio in the podcast. The first thing you’ll hear is …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Don’t Worry, Turkey on Thanksgiving is Historically Accurate!

Posted by: Stephen Winick

Each year, as Thanksgiving Day rolls around, the blogosphere is bombarded with articles telling us that everything we know about Thanksgiving is wrong. In particular, these articles focus on the three-day event in autumn 1621, during which English colonists at Plymouth, Massachusetts, hosted 90 members of the Wampanoag tribe for a feast. Skeptical articles revisiting …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Thanksgiving Road Trip

Posted by: Kerry Ward

The following is the fourth in a series relating to the Medal of Honor. Thanksgiving, with millions of Americans on the road, is one of the busiest travel seasons of the year.  If you’re doing the traveling this year, I implore you to try a new travel game: find the Medal of Honor landmarks/monuments across America, and the recipients …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Scrooge’s Prize Turkey: Victorian Christmas Foodways in Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”

Posted by: Stephen Winick

This post is part of an occasional series about ethnography and folklore in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  Find the whole series here! In our last look at the foodways of Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol, we examined the joy the Cratchits take in their small but serviceable Christmas goose, as Scrooge and the Ghost …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Festivus and Family Lore

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

This time of year many people celebrate Festivus, an alternative holiday that is based on a single episode of the television show Seinfeld, “The Strike,” which aired on December 18, 1997. It is most commonly celebrated on December 23 or another date in December, but it can be celebrated at other times of the year. …

A man playing a guitar and singing to a close crowd of a dozen or so men and women

Songs of the Harvest

Posted by: Stephanie Hall

Thanksgiving days were declared by United States Presidents at various times in American history, beginning with George Washington making November  26, 1789, a day of thanksgiving, but Thanksgiving was not established as a regular yearly Federal holiday until 1870. So there are not a great many songs specifically for American Thanksgiving, and these were composed …