News: Happy Thanksgiving!

(via Serious Eats)

Above you can view Charlie Chaplin's Thanksgiving scene from The Gold Rush (1925), in which he cooks and eats his shoe. It sets the tone for a Thanksgiving that has been dominated by echoes of previous hard times. Wary that shoes might be on the menu again soon, much attention has been given this year to thoughts about Black Friday - the now traditional post-Thanksgiving shopping blitz. The Financial Times, at least, is not optimistic:

It is hard to see where consumers' cash will come from. The savings rate is low. Credit is scarce. Mortgage equity withdrawal, which averaged $150bn a month for the past five years, was just $10bn in each of the first two quarters of 2008, Creditsights says. Wage growth is running at just 2 per cent, while 1.2m fewer people are employed compared with last December. Consumer confidence has shown its greatest collapse of the post war period. Happy Thanksgiving.

For some more up-to-date, though no less relevant, Thanksgiving-based comic relief, you can take a look at Sarah Palin's now infamous turkey-massacre interview here. And George Bush pardoned his last Thanksgiving turkey yesterday, and there's got be a joke in there somewhere. Time magazine offers up a brief history of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, whilst EarhCam is going to be streaming the event here. And President Elect Obama? Handing out food to the needy, as if you had to ask. And finally: the Boston Globe looks at the historical development of Thanksgiving celebrations with reference to Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, author of Northwood (1827) and "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (1830), also known as "the Mother of Thanksgiving."