The rule at a wedding is don’t show up the bride. The rule at Thanksgiving dinner is don’t show up the bird.
“The Thanksgiving Dinner should always be plain and plentiful,” The Granville Sentinel suggested on Nov. 30, 1894. “The turkey is so grand a dish that it should not be obscured by its surroundings.”
In other Thanksgiving dinner news collected from historic newspapers in Northern New York:
The turkey had empathy, but seemingly not sympathy, for the cranberries in this free-verse poem “Thanksgiving Talk,” which retail grocer J. C. Kelly published in an advertisement in The Morning Star of Glens Falls, NY, on Nov. 28, 1894.
“Well! Cranberries, here we are again. I suppose we can’t stay much longer. I don’t see where our Thanksgiving comes in, but I know where we’ll come in next Thursday, and I don’t feel a bit thankful about it, either. I wish people would try to get along without turkey.
“They could eat sausage, you know, sugar-cured ham or bacon, and plenty of other good things. I could tell them just where to get them.”
I wonder what the turkey would think about fresh radishes as a side dish?
“Frank Stevens of Salem can boast of radishes from his garden Thanksgiving day, which grew from seed planted in the Spring to full size, and was eaten that day,” The Granville Sentinel
reported on Dec. 7, 1894.
“The editor is indebted to M. J. Hayes for a fine turkey for his Thanksgiving Dinner,” The Granville Sentinel reported on Nov. 30, 1894.
Poultry business in Glens Falls was robust two days before Thanksgiving. “Large quantities of poultry were brought to town yesterday by farmers who sold their stock to dealers at 14 cents a pound for turkeys, and twelve-and-a-half cents per pound for chickens,” The Morning Star reported on Nov. 28, 1894.
“A great many turkeys change hands on Thanksgiving day, and a great many more exchanged this world for the next,” the Mineville correspondent reported in the Ticonderoga Sentinel on Dec. 6, 1878.
“A live turkey would seem to be less noisy than a dead one, for one makes only a din and the other a dinner,” the Ticonderoga Sentinel punned on May 23, 1879.
“The fat gobbler has not much longer to turkey’s ease,” the Ticonderoga Sentinel reported on Oct. 24, 1879.
“Thursday next will be Thanksgiving Day, but speak of it softly for now. The turkey gobbler has mush and thinks a long life will be his. How little he knows! At another week’s close, picking his bones will be the chief biz,” the Elizabethtown Post & Gazette reported on Nov. 29, 1879.
“Finding a basket on her stoop, a cautious woman of Newport, R.I., took it to the police station and was surprised to learn after that it contained a twenty-pound turkey and not a foundling,” the Elizabethtown Post & Gazette reported on Jan. 8, 1880.
“Joe Green, the popular clothier, gave his employees each a large turkey for Thanksgiving,” The Granville Sentinel reported on Nov. 30, 1888. “He also remembered the editor of this paper with a similar gift – and a ‘dandy’ too. Joe not only clothes the naked, figuratively speaking, but feeds the hungry.”
“The four-legged turkey owned by David Breen, a Kingsbury farmer living on the Country Line Road, died the other day, aged about six months,” The Granville Sentinel reported on Feb. 6, 1891. “He early obtained much notoriety, his advent chronicled in the press far and wide. So, although the feathered quadruped’s life was short, the bird has not, perhaps, lived in vain.”
“Abram Atwood, a poulterer of Lewiston Me., sold a turkey to a patron, and the latter found in the fowl’s crop a gold bosom pin worth twice the price of the turkey,” The Granville Sentinel reported on Sept. 13, 1895.
Illustration, a circa 1925 Thanksgiving postcard.
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