Michael--

I was just sitting here twiddling my thumbs before heading out to the airport. I am dragging my long-suffering nuclear family off to see my Dad on the East Coast. (This should not be construed as meaning that I am from the East Coast—I am a Midwesterner born and bred, raised in the Motor City. It’s not my fault that the old parental unit decided to build his retirement home so hellaciously far away.)

Anyway, I thought I should make some sort of Thanksgiving gesture to our loyal readers (may they ever increase—in numbers, not in waistline) and so started aimlessly trolling the Web with a Google search on…of all things…Thanksgiving! Obviously endless stuff pops up, but, to me, the most significant items are the real-life Thanksgiving snapshots people have posted. When hipsters started talking a few years ago about how the Web was going to change everything, I for one never anticipated the way it would bring me into a form of domestic intimacy with so many people I’d never met. A few months ago when I was researching pictures of the Parthenon in Athens, I was surprised to see that many of the best shots had been taken by tourists and posted on their individual websites. I didn’t use any of them, because they usually had themselves or their loved ones in the picture, but I still went away quite impressed at catching a glimpse at the amount of thought, creativity and general adventure that occurs at what used to be an utterly private level. History will never be the same, assuming that historians are smart enough to download virtually the entire World Wide Web on a regular basis.

Anyway, I came away from my very brief search with this iconic Thanksgiving picture for all of you. I don’t know who created it, but a tip of the hat to the Unknown Artist.

Iconic Thanksgiving Picture By Unknown Artist

I also stumbled across the following, a page of doodles entitled “Thanksgiving”—note the stuffing recipe in the upper right corner.

G. Fama, Thanksgiving, 1998

This is from the website of Gene Fama, which you can see here. Gene is, well, I don’t know what Gene is now, but at one point he was a comic book artist and a funny guy. (He probably still is.) He has some very amusing doodles and other entertaining stuff, including a page of his daughter’s drawings, on his site.

Anyway, a Happy Thanksgiving to Gene (happier anyway than 1998 on the evidence of his drawing--although with artists you can never tell) and all the rest of you.

Cheers,

Friedrich