There are many things you don’t know. Let’s face it, that’s just the way it is. That’s why you gather around me on these holidays to gain some small nugget of wisdom that might serve to light the flame of knowledge within you.
My flame of knowledge is, of course, burning quite bright. Only the other day, a nice man on the street noticed it when he said, “Could you BE any more flaming?!” Obviously, he recognizes the wisdom which burns within.
Anyway, this little known fact I will share with you as we prepare to feast on Thanksgiving. Halloween and Thanksgiving used to be the same holiday! Yup, I kid you not. The story is pretty straight-forward:
Thanksgiving and Halloween were celebrated as a single holiday (Thanksween) on November 12 each year. It was a day of thanks to the people who make candy. People would gather with their families and feast on candy and then get so hyper they’d run around in stupid costumes. Sounds like a good deal, right? So why did it change? Tax reasons! After some research, the holiday discovered it was getting gouged by the IRS and that it could get some tax shelter by paying the IRS as two holidays filing singly as opposed to two holidays filing jointly with no dependents.
And so, Thanksgiving and Halloween split into seperate corporate entities with a single managing director (Santa Claus). The parent company for these two companies was SantaGlobalHolidayNet and was headquartered in the Cayman Islands. (Interesting fact: SantaGlobalHolidayNet eventually collapsed after a disastrous PR mess when they invested heavily in the failed holiday attempt – “Hitler’s Birthday.”) Interestingly, both Thanksgiving and Halloween are now owned by Michael Jackson.
Nevertheless, despite the many changes, to this day there are still echoes of the original Halloween/Thanksgiving combo.
For example, one of the great farmers’ traditions is to raise a turkey especially for Thanksgiving and then kill it the day before Thanksgiving. On Thanksween a similar thing would occur. The turkey would be released into a dark house and walk slowly up and down the hallways getting more and more nervous and it’s more and more dark and more and more eerie and then WHAM! Suddenly Dad would burst out of a closet with a hockey mask and chainsaw and carve it into turkey McNuggets.
So, as you can see, the Thanksween tradition lives on in our hearts and may it never die. God bless us every one.
Happy Thanksween.