Thanksgiving

Everyone Loves a Parade

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

That time I almost led the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade by accident.

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Each Thanksgiving morning I experience the flutter of a memory of a moment in which my own experience of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles almost came true. Mine was going to involve accidental participation in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade between my bus and train, however, which is a notion that even the late John Hughes might have rejected as far-fetched.
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Thanks for Thanksgiving

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In her earlier career as a poet and editor, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1788–1879) composed a poem so beloved it is a surprise to learn that a human being wrote it: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” She is also the individual most responsible for the creation of an American holiday so beloved that it is a surprise to learn that someone had to campaign for it: Thanksgiving, which we celebrate today.
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‘You can get anything you want’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

An essay in tribute to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”

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There are three quotes, three statements, in my head this Thanksgiving afternoon, 2016.

Earlier this morning, a friend and I were chatting about our different Thanksgiving Day plans and he asked me if I had ever been to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City. (I almost marched in it, by accident of all things, but that is an anecdote for a different blog post. Perhaps later today.)

“Well, I just hope,” he said, that no one tries any terrorism down there today, but if they do,” and here he looked like someone who hoped that “someone” would “try terrorism down there” because he added, “If they do, I hope we go ahead and use our nuclear weapons the way they were meant to be used. Just go over there and flatten that whole place.”
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