Thanksgiving: Family, Food, Football, and Tradition
November is one of my favorite times of the year. The early morning brings frost and crisp air, and sweater weather is in full swing. During the holidays, I see my whole family. That means not being able to eat your turkey because there are nineteen people crammed around one table, and not enough elbow room to use your knife. It means listening to the ten-minute-long grace while your food gets cold, but it does not matter because you can’t lift your arms enough to eat it anyway. It means all of those amazingly terrible family stories and teaching Granddad dirty jokes. It means Christmas card
opportunities in front of the Woodie Wagon that your cousins abandoned on the side of the road after it broke down during a joy ride, or guessing who was photo-shopped into the card this time. It means craft beer, open wine bottles, and karaoke. It also means a whole day of football. Ah, Thanksgiving, that wonderful time of year full of family, food… and football.
One of the characteristic American rituals of Thanksgiving Day is football. The NFL has a Thanksgiving tradition of its own. In 1934, the first Thanksgiving Day game was broadcast on TV, when the Detroit Lions, during their first year as a franchise, took on the Chicago Bears at the University of Detroit Stadium. However,
“the first Turkey Day game was played in 1869, and it has been part of the NFL since 1920.”
The original Thanksgiving games began with college football and the Princeton- Yale rivalry. Princeton and Yale played every year on the holiday from 1876 to 1881, when the game was changed to a “national” championship game. Other universities started to follow the tradition before the end of the 19th century.
The Thanksgiving tradition has continued in the pro leagues since the NFL was founded in 1920. The Chicago Bears played the Chicago Cardinals every year between 1922 and 1933, but in 1934 the annual game moved to Detroit and the Cardinals went to Green Bay. The Bears played in Detroit until 1938, and Thanksgiving games stopped during World War II. After the war ended, Detroit was the only team to continue the tradition, and they have held onto it since.
In 1966, television networks added a late-afternoon game, asking the Dallas Cowboys to host the morning game. They agreed, with the condition that they too could make it an annual tradition. With the exception of two years in the 1970s, the Lions and the Cowboys hosted the only two Thanksgiving games each year for fifty years, until 2006, when the NFL network opened a third spot of its own. In addition to the Lions and the Cowboys, the NFL can schedule a marquee game with no restrictions on hosts or conference matchups.
This past Thanksgiving, the Lions dominated the Philadelphia Eagles 45-14, the Carolina Panthers grabbed their 11th win in a row, defeating the Cowboys 33-14, and the Bears upset the Packers in Green Bay, 17-13.
Every family has its own Thanksgiving traditions, and sometimes they change. Maybe you watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, or maybe you are there in person. Maybe you spend the whole day cooking, or maybe you spend the day in the car driving to Grandma’s. But the NFL remains consistent, and if you are not outside throwing the football around, you will always be able to tune in and catch a game on TV.