The History Behind Holiday Traditions: Thanksgiving

I love learning the history behind holiday traditions. I love sharing that passion for the history behind holiday traditions with my students even more. Once the craziness of Halloween is past, we enter the biggest holiday season of the year. First, there’s Thanksgiving and then comes Christmas and New Years back to back to back. With those holidays come so many fun and meaningful traditions. I. Love. Them.

We started off the season by exploring the book, Balloons Over Broadway, one of my all-time favorites for learning the history of holiday traditions. This book follows Tony Sarg from early childhood through the time in his life when he starts creating for Macy’s department store. First he was hired to create displays in windows. Then he began working on creating a parade to bring some of the traditions of the immigrants to New York City. It outlines his love for puppets and how his ideas for the Macy’s Parade came from his love of puppetry. It. Is. Perfect. There’s so much to discuss. Love the link to immigrants too and their traditions and how those traditions bring new and rich traditions to our world.

After reading the book, we had a ton of fun stretching out our learning to really dig into the history of the parade and the events that led up to it. One of the activities we did was to create these cute Macy’s Wondertown display booklets. On the front cover, students created their own design for a holiday window in Macy’s department store. Afterwards, they read about how Tony started with the windows and how that led him to creating other things for Macy, including the Macy’s Parade as we know it.

Last year, my family went to the Museum for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta and I was just so inspired by the puppets and the history there. I knew I wanted to find a way to bring puppets into my classroom. When I really sat down with the book, Balloons Over Broadway, I knew I had found the link. Tony also loved puppets and especially marionette puppets. I created a short page on the history of marionettes and then the students created their own little marionette-style puppet that was inspired by the book. They were so absolutely excited…and continue to be excited over them.

We also learned about the steps that Tony used to create the balloons for the Macy’s parade. We created our own designs for a Macy’s day balloon. My students loved all of these activities. It all came together so nicely.

Another book we read was called Thanksgiving in the Whitehouse. This book explored the tradition of pardoning turkeys. I also loved that this book had so much that could be used for exploring character. It was based on events of the lives of Abe Lincoln and his son Tad when they were living in the White House. The themes I picked out were compassion and perseverance, perfect for any classroom for sure. I also loved that it told about Tad and his determination to save the Thanksgiving turkey that he fell in love with and wanted to keep as a pet. In the end, Abe Lincoln decided to pardon Jack, the Thanksgiving turkey from Thanksgiving dinner.

We popped on to YouTube to see a video showing our current president granting a presidential pardon to a turkey and talked about how this is a fun Thanksgiving tradition that happens every year. After the video, I gave each child a preprinted turkey. They had to disguise their turkey for the Thanksgiving feast so that it could not be recognized as a turkey. We took it a step farther and had each student think about the reasons their turkeys should be “pardoned” from Thanksgiving dinner. They were suppose to really be creative and have powerful reasons as to why their turkeys should be saved.

Once the students were done with their reasons, they were told that they needed to turn those reasons into a persuasive essay that they would be reading in court before the judge. Their job was to persuade the judge (me dressed in my graduation gown) that their turkey deserved a pardon. The class really took this seriously. It was the right real-world link for this activity. The students were very nervous when it was time to take the stand before the judge and fight for their turkeys. It was priceless.

One of my highlights where when one of my students, who passionately spoke about why her turkey should be saved looked at me and said, “Besides, aren’t you a vegetarian?” Why yes, yes I am. It was perfect. I even had a student come back a day later to ask if we could do another type of persuasive writing that we could bring before the “judge”. If they are asking for more, I count that as a definite win, friends.

The last book we read about Thanksgiving traditions was called The Woman Who Saved Thanksgiving. This was again a great book for teaching character….filled with drive and determination. It is the true story of author, Sarah Hale who wanted to try to save Thanksgiving. It was disappearing and was not even celebrated by the entire country. She wanted to create an official day for the holiday and wanted the entire country to come together one day to celebrate thankfulness. She literally took up her pen and wrote letter after letter…thousands of them to lawmakers and president after president. It took her 38 years to FINALLY have Thanksgiving proclaimed as a national holiday….but she did it. We now have both her and Abe Lincoln to thank for the holiday. And by the way, she is the author who also wrote none other than, Mary had a Little Lamb.

I decided to launch a new series on Teachers Pay Teachers to help me celebrate the holidays in a way that I love best, through the lens of learning the history behind the holiday traditions. All of the activities listed above and more are in my History Behind the Holiday packs. If you are interested, you can click on the pictures below to be taken to my TPT store.