Mark 7:7
Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of
men. 8For
laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men,
https://typewritermonkeytaskforce.com/2015/11/23/strange-american-turkey-rituals/
As much as I like the United States of America, I’m confused and disturbed by some of its customs. (The traditions in my homeland of Ecuador seemed so much simpler.) For example, Americans will celebrate a festival of ritualistic gluttony known as Thanksgiving in just a few days.
We at Typewriter Monkey Task Force pride ourselves on our anthropological researches. Although we generally reserve our investigations for important matters such as geek culture and cartoons for little girls, we’re expanding our vision to cover American holidays. Our research is completely authentic, and presented in a factual manner utterly devoid of humor, sarcasm, or silliness.*
As I recovered from last month’s sinister pumpkin rituals, I heard disquieting rumors of a November celebration for which Americans gather to disembowel turkeys and observe brutal bouts of gladiatorial violence. Halloween was odd, but Thanksgiving truly takes the cake… or the pie in this case.
Let’s start with the turkeys.
I’m guessing this is some kind of ritual sacrifice.
According to tradition, many American families prepare a turkey for the Thanksgiving festival. The bird is slaughtered and disemboweled. Then, in a macabre twist, its innards are replaced with a mixture of dried bread and spices. Thus desecrated, the turkey’s carcass is placed in an oven, cooked, and then served as part of the traditional Thanksgiving meal.
I can only speculate that the Thanksgiving turkey is a sacrifice offered as an act of thanksgiving for a good year, hence the name of the holiday. Note that the bird is not immolated as a burnt offering. It is eaten instead by participants in the Thanksgiving festival. I can only infer that the turkey’s ceremonial function is similar to the wave offering prescribed for ancient Israel in the earlier books Old Testament: an offering dedicated, but eaten instead of burned.
The sacrificial turkey is generally served with foods such as mashed potatoes, gravy, ham, corn, bread rolls, pies, and sauerkraut. (I presume sauerkraut is eaten because it has ceremonial significance; I can hardly imagine anyone actually liking the stuff.) Collectively, these foods are called Thanksgiving dinner.
Thanksgiving dinner is often devoured with reckless enthusiasm. This annual display of gluttony occurs so widely that it may be ritualistic. Worship has taken many forms in different epochs and cultures: singing, dancing, praying, meditating, offering sacrifices, making pilgrimages, giving alms, and even inflicting self-harm. Could overeating be a form of worship unique to the Thanksgiving festival? Of course, these are just speculations.
Ritual - a way of doing something in which the same actions are done in the same way every time: Cambridge Dictionary
A professor of history explains that most modern Thanksgiving traditions began in the mid-19th century, more than two centuries after the Pilgrims’ first harvest celebration.
Have you ever wondered why Thanksgiving revolves around turkey and not ham, chicken, venison, beef or corn?
Almost 9 in 10 Americans eat turkey during this festive meal, whether it’s roasted, deep-fried, grilled or cooked in any other way for the occasion.
You might believe it’s because of what the Pilgrims, a year after they landed in what’s now the state of Massachusetts, and their Indigenous Wampanoag guests ate during their first thanksgiving feast in 1621. Or that it’s because turkey is originally from the Americas.
But it has more to do with how Americans observed the holiday in the late 1800s than which poultry the Pilgrims ate while celebrating their bounty in 1621.
The only firsthand record of what the Pilgrims ate at the first thanksgiving feast comes from Edward Winslow. He noted that the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, arrived with 90 men, and the two communities feasted together for three days.
Winslow wrote little about the menu, aside from mentioning five deer that the Wampanoag brought and that the meal included “fowle,” which could have been any number of wild birds found in the area, including ducks, geese and turkeys.
Historians do know that important ingredients of today’s traditional dishes were not available during that first Thanksgiving.
That includes potatoes and green beans. The likely absence of wheat flour and the scarcity of sugar in New England at the time ruled out pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce. Some sort of squash, a staple of Native American diets, was almost certainly served, along with corn and shellfish.
Historians like me who have studied the history of food have found that most modern Thanksgiving traditions began in the mid-19th century, more than two centuries after the Pilgrims’ first harvest celebration.
The reinvention of the Pilgrims’ celebration as a national holiday was largely the work of Sarah Hale. Born in New Hampshire in 1784, as a young widow she published poetry to earn a living. Most notably, she wrote the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
In 1837, Hale became the editor of the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. Fiercely religious and family-focused, it crusaded for the creation of an annual national holiday of “Thanksgiving and Praise” commemorating the Pilgrims’ thanksgiving feast.
Hale and her colleagues leaned on 1621 lore for historical justification. Like many of her contemporaries, she assumed the Pilgrims ate turkey at their first feast because of the abundance of edible wild turkeys in New England.
This campaign took decades, partly due to a lack of enthusiasm among white Southerners. Many of them considered an earlier celebration among Virginia colonists in honor of supply ships that arrived at Jamestown in 1610 to be the more important precedent.
The absence of Southerners serving in Congress during the Civil War enabled President Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.
Godey’s, along with other media, embraced the holiday, packing their pages with recipes from New England and menus that prominently featured turkey.
“We dare say most of the Thanksgiving will take the form of gastronomic pleasure,” Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle predicted in 1882. “Every person who can afford turkey or procure it will sacrifice the noble American fowl to-day.”
One reason for this: A roasted turkey makes a perfect celebratory centerpiece.
A second one is that turkey is also practical for serving to a large crowd. Turkeys are bigger than other birds raised or hunted for their meat, and it’s cheaper to produce a turkey than a cow or pig. The bird’s attributes led Europeans to incorporate turkeys into their diets following their colonization of the Americas. In England, King Henry VIII regularly enjoyed turkey on Christmas day a century before the Pilgrims’ feast.
The bird cemented its position as the favored Christmas dish in England in the mid-19th century.
One reason for this was that Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” sought redemption by replacing the impoverished Cratchit family’s meager goose with an enormous turkey.
Published in 1843, Dickens’ instantly best-selling depiction of the prayerful family meal would soon inspire Hale’s idealized Thanksgiving.
Although the historical record is hazy, I do think it’s possible that the Pilgrims ate turkey in 1621. It certainly was served at celebrations in New England throughout the colonial period.
Thanksgiving turkey presidential pardons at the White House through the years
To Pardon someone or something such as a Turkey they must have commited some kind of crime....what crime did the Turkey commit that they need to be saved from being sacrificed for somebody's Thanksgiving dinner?
The Presidential Turkey Pardon, explained
Or, does the ritual of the two turkeys have anything to do with the ritual of the two goats on Yom Kippur?
Mark Silk - Religion News
The food having been consumed, the visitors having returned to their domiciles, I can turn to the question posed in a Thanksgiving Day email by my old friend Guy Stroumsa, the Martin Buber Professor of Comparative Religion emeritus at the Hebrew University and Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions emeritus at Oxford. Guy, who is spending the semester in Ann Arbor, wrote:
Watching on the Guardian this morning, Obama, flanked by his two daughters, releasing one of the two turkeys, sent to freedom in the name of the American people, while the other is being slaughtered for the festival. Is this a remembrance of the two goats sent by the High Priest on Yom Kippur, one to Azazel (and its death in the desert), the other being slaughtered in sacrifice? (Leviticus 16: 8).
Let’s begin by noting that Thanksgiving is the harvest festival of the American Civil Religion. We commemorate the arrival of the Puritans (renamed Pilgrims in the 19th century) by traveling to the domestic shrines of relatives and friends. There we give thanks for our blessings over the same animal, a roasted native fowl.
There is some resemblance here to Sukkot, the great harvest festival of the Israelites that entailed a pilgrimage (hag) to the Temple in Jerusalem, recapitulating with a surfeit of sacrificed animals their aboriginal pilgrimage from Egypt to the Promised Land. Sukkot is the third of the High Holidays, which begin with Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and continue with Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
As Guy notes, part of the ancient Yom Kippur ritual involved a casting of lots over two he-goats, one of which was sacrificed to the Lord as a “sin offering” while the other was sent into the wilderness to Azazel — possibly a place but widely believed to be some demonic power. This other has given us the term “scapegoat,” because, according to the MIshnah, the high priest of the Second Temple would, before having it sent on its way, place his hands on it and say, “O God, Thy people, the house of Israel, has sinned and transgressed before Thee….”
A sin offering (קרבן חטאת) was made to atone for unintentional sins. The scapegoat, it seems, was symbolically laden with the sins that had been committed intentionally.
And what of the Thanksgiving ritual performed by the American Civil Religion’s high priest — the Presidential Turkey Pardon (PTP)?
Although presidents began to be formally presented with turkeys in 1947, the pardon ritual dates only to 1989, the first year of the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Initially, it seems, only one of the birds received was pardoned, leading to a Thanksgiving 2000 episode of The West Wing in which press secretary C.J. Cregg introduces the subject to her boss:
- C.J: Um, Mr. President?
- Bartlet: Yes?
- C.J: Hi
- Bartlet: Hi
- C.J: I’m sorry to ask you this, Sir, but –
- Bartlet: Not too late to stop yourself
- C.J: I need you to pardon a turkey
- Bartlet: I already pardoned a turkey
- C.J: I need you to pardon another one.
- Bartlet: Didn’t I do it right?
- C.J: You did it great, but I need you to come out here and pardon another one.
- Bartlet: Aren’t I going to get a reputation for being soft on turkeys?
- C.J: Sir, can you just come out here and get this over –
- Bartlet: No, I’m not going to – C.J. – what the hell is going on?
- C.J: They sent me two turkeys. The more photo-friendly of the two gets a presidential pardon and a full life at a children’s zoo. The runner-up gets eaten.
- Bartlet: If the Oscars were like that I’d watch.
C.J. gets her boss to pardon the second turkey, which he does by drafting it into the military — a joke that presumably would have been less amusing, if more to the point, the following year (cf. the October 2001 military invasion of Afghanistan).
Subsequently, according to Wikipedia, both turkeys have received pardons, with the implication — made explicit by President Obama this year — that if the first turkey cannot serve, the second one will take its place.
So my conclusion is this. In its first decade, the PTP was very much modeled on the ancient Israelite ritual of the two goats, with one animal sacrificed and consumed and the other liberated and sent to live out its days as best it could. But perhaps as a result of the West Wing episode, the double pardon was instituted, with the institution transformed from a rite of atonement to a species of beauty pageant. From the perspective of religious ritual, I wouldn’t say that’s been an improvement.
Jeremiah 10:3 For the customs of the people are vain: 2 Timothy 4:3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine;
Luke 16:8 for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.
Excerpted from CONSIDER THE TURKEY
Peter Singer - Big Think
The United States has many strange practices, but one of the oddest is surely the annual ritual of “pardoning” a turkey before Thanksgiving. Although President Abraham Lincoln is said to have spared a live turkey who had been brought home for Christmas dinner, presidential pardons for turkeys go back only 60 years. As with so many US practices, this one began with a clever marketing idea: the National Turkey Federation presented a live turkey to President Harry S. Truman for Thanksgiving dinner. The presentation made the media, and after that, it became an annual event. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy received a turkey who draped around his neck, had a sign saying, “Good Eating, Mr. President.” Face-to-face with the turkey, the president said, “We’ll just let this one grow.” His immediate successors didn’t follow his example, but President George H. W. Bush did, and from then on, every president has continued to “pardon” a turkey, or sometimes two turkeys, just before Thanksgiving.
The US Constitution authorizes the president to grant a pardon for a federal crime, but no one has ever suggested a crime for which the turkeys are supposedly being pardoned. Presumably that’s because turkeys don’t commit crimes. Does it make families in the United States feel better, as they chew on the corpse of one of the 46 million turkeys killed annually for Thanksgiving dinners, to know that somewhere, two of them are still alive?
Our minds can play strange tricks, especially when we have doubts, perhaps unconscious ones, about the ethics of something we want to do. Could Americans today imagine that the spared turkey carries away the sin of the turkey dinner, as the ancient Hebrews believed that if they let a goat escape into the desert, the “scapegoat” would carry away their sins? Or is it just all a convenient alliance between the interests of producers in selling more turkeys and those of US presidents in staying on friendly terms with agribusiness? Is it at all relevant that Jennie-O, the supplier of the turkeys pardoned by President Joseph Biden in 2023 and the nation’s second-biggest turkey producer, received nearly $89 million in 2022-23 from the federal government as compensation for the deaths of turkeys it owned—millions of whom it killed slowly, by heating them to death?
How we treat animals is fundamentally an ethical issue, and one that I have been thinking and writing about for more than fifty years. Over that time, we have made some progress, but not nearly enough, and in some respects, we have gone backward.
Mass turkey production illustrates how things have gone wrong. I do not believe that most people in the United States regard the practices I describe in my book, Consider the Turkey, as acceptable, yet by buying and consuming turkey products, they are complicit in them. So my primary motivation for writing Consider the Turkey is to inform Americans about the nature of the bird who is the centerpiece of their most celebrated meal, and about the lives and deaths of the more than 210 million turkeys commercially produced in the United States in 2022. But I hope that the book will prompt people everywhere to inquire into the lives and deaths of the animals traditionally consumed for celebrations, whether it is Christmas, Passover, or Eid.
For many of you, by the time you have finished reading my, no more ethical argument will be necessary. You will already know that what I describe is wrong. For others, I will, before the end of the book, briefly sketch a simple ethical argument that shows that to support the present industrial system of producing turkeys is wrong.
Comment: Eating turkey is not a sin of course but they way Turkey is the ritualistic meal for the man made (not god ordained) day of American Thanksgiving and some cases Christmas is no different than the Catholic tradition of eating fish on Friday because the church instructed Catholics to abstain from eating any meat or wam-blooded land animals on that day.
Turkey day
So basically Turkeys are mass produced and bred to be sacrificed for one day.
Is that biblical?
Proverbs 12:10 A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.