It’s Thanksgiving here in America. The holiday which has it all, the perfect mix of politics, business and sport.
Always the fourth Thursday of November and traditionally the day we recount the earliest settlers’ arrival on these shores and the celebration of that first harvest, a blessing for the new year, and the good times that lay ahead.
Folklore and time have shifted the story into something more significant about the 1621 co-celebration between evangelical pilgrims and the indigenous Wampanoag people, the original occupants of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The bit about western diseases wiping out the native inhabitants understandably gets lost in the telling of this version of the story.
Now, Thanksgiving is a significant holiday for so many other reasons.
It’s big business for poultry farmers. According to National Turkey Federation (NTF) lobbyists this week 88% of Americans will sit down to a Turkey dinner. They forecast that 46million birds will be gobbled up for Thanksgiving and North Carolina-based Butterball will sell one in every three.
Amongst all those feathers, one fortunate fowl will be issued with a Presidential pardon as part of an NTF stunt which has been going on since 1947 when Harry Truman first gave a bird its freedom – though the long-term fate of the pardoned bird is more murky, many, it seems, don’t make it past Christmas.
It is also one of the busiest travel days in America, as traditionally your kids and extended family members descend on your home from across the nation. The Transport Security Administration (TSA) who screen the nation’s air travellers, projects that around 18.3million people will be asked to remove their shoes and take their laptops from their bags this week – a 6% increase on last year.
The day before Thanksgiving is also the single busiest day for US hospitality venues, bars and restaurants outstripping New Years Eve, Valentine’s Day or July 4th. With all those displaced people arriving in their hometowns, ‘get-togethers’ with pals and school chums in local pubs, bars and restaurants the night before spares mum from catering twice.
And with the nation more polarized than ever before, this year the ‘feast of thanks’ may turn into the ‘airing of grievances’. Research from online pollsters Prolific indicates that 22% of Americans report increased tensions between family members since the election, and when thanksgiving tables are attended by groups with differing political views, dinners are between 20 and 50 minutes shorter as we choose not to engage for too long with Uncle Leo and Aunty Nancy’s world view on Trump, Gaza and The Southern Border.
But mostly Thanksgiving is about commerce.
It is widely seen as the day which formally kickstarts the long retail campaign to Christmas. Macy’s department store sponsors New York City’s traditional parade down Fifth Avenue. Around the country, the Christmas lights are turned on, and Santa makes the first of thousands of appearances in shopping malls, farmers’ markets and high streets.
While most stores are closed on Thanksgiving Day itself, it is only a pause before the real heavy duty, hand-to-hand combat of holiday shopping commences.
Because so many Americans are ‘out of town’ for Thanksgiving most employers in both the private and public sector declare the day after as a holiday – hence, Black Friday.
There are some interesting versions of the origin of this name, that it represents the day at which US retailers finally ‘enter the black’ – profitability – but that always raises a chuckle with my retail analyst pals on Wall Street, chortling at the idea Walmart and Amazon only make money in the last six weeks of the year.
Black Friday is now synonymous with bargains and the lengths people will go to save a few bucks. People wrapped in sleeping bags in -25C blizzards will routinely be interviewed by news reporters flummoxed by their plan to sleep outside a big box retailer in the hope of snagging a big screen TV or garden furniture at a heavy discount.
And as the nation’s retail itch is now rarely scratched physically, Black Friday has spawned its digital sibling Black Monday when on-line retailers offer mega deals to those willing to sit up all night waiting to fill their digital trolley.
Thanksgiving is also a huge day on the nation’s sporting calendar, dominated by American Football.
At every level of the game, Thanksgiving fixtures feature.
Living down here on the Florida Gulf shore, we witness impromptu beach games between uncles, cousins, dads and daughters known as Turkey Bowls. It is always a comical mix of very out of shape elderly relatives, bubblingly enthusiastic toddlers and pre-teens, and an Uncle Rico character who is taking it far too seriously, reliving some scarring high school memory, shouting plays and barking orders as family quarterback.
College football is almost as popular as the professional game in certain parts of the nation and the big grid iron schools play their fiercest rivals over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend – Auburn vs Alabama, Florida vs Florida State, Washington vs Oregon and Michigan vs Ohio State – often in front of live crowds of 100,000+ and tens of millions more watching on television.
But the big show is still the pro-game. For more than 50 years the NFL has arranged a few games on Thanksgiving and in nearly every one of those The Detroit Lions and The Dallas Cowboys have featured. As with so much of the traditions of the holiday it started as ‘marketing’ but due to its popularity has established itself as a ‘tradition’ – perhaps the ultimate accolade for any advertising or pr executive.
And though traditions are always welcome, so is innovation.
This year, following advances in technology, changes in regulations, and billions spent on marketing and sponsorship I’ll be giving thanks if new opportunities in on-line gambling and betting appear.
US sportsbooks and fantasy leagues have long been market leaders for those of us who like a flutter with our sports, but typically we have been restricted to placing a wager on the final outcome long before the first ball or puck is kicked, pitched, slapped or tipped.
Premier League gamblers in the UK will be accustomed to switching their bets, adding to their stake or ‘cashing out’ in real time as they see the game unfold. Here in the US, this opportunity is still not widely available.
In part it is because of the sheer enormity of the sports market here. For the betting sites and their offshore financers to be able to keep tabs on the progress of every professional sports fixture would require armies of bookies’ spotters and runners to be at the games to react as quickly or quicker to any significant change in fortunes – red card, penalty, injury – than the hundreds of thousands of spectators with a phone in their pocket, and be able to price the likely outcome correctly. The house rarely likes to be in the position of ‘least well informed’.
And while on-line betting is legal in the majority of states – 38 and the District of Colombia – there are restrictions in how it operates. Some jurisdictions don’t like live betting or in game odds-setting. They recognise that with huge amounts of money potentially being wagered on the outcome of a split-second live event, the risk of ‘interference’ is heightened.
But I’m hopeful. This Thanksgiving I am keeping my fingers crossed that my Florida sports book will find a way to speed up its algorithm, employ AI odds setters, and offer the opportunity for me to be sat on the sofa, full of turkey, soaked in holiday cheer, and able to punt a buck or two on the outcome of whatever game is live on the local TV network.
Interestingly, Hard Rock Bet – the only legal online sports book in Florida – is owned and operated by the Seminole Indian tribe, so, in what seems like perfect Thanksgiving schadenfreude, they now have the chance to make a few dollars from us Europeans.
