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.
