My Thanksgiving: A Brief Ethnography

My Thanksgiving: A Brief Ethnography
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My Thanksgiving: A Brief Ethnography
Introduction
The earliest recorded forms of a Thanksgiving celebration were done in the 1620s by Indian pilgrims and were known as harvest feasts and would at times last days with hunting and merry-making. Since then, variations of the celebration had happened until 1863, when it was adopted in the United States. In 1942, the fourth Thursday of November was declared as a national Thanksgiving Day.
The setting and activities for the day
As Haviland highlighted as a characteristic of culture, the evolution and change in culture have drastically changed modern-day Thanksgiving celebrations from those pilgrim days (Haviland 2017, 40). The setting of the celebration is preferably at home. With busy modern-day schedules and people living far from each other, it is ideal for taking advantage of this time to gather and catch up. Even though the actual celebration takes place in the evening, the entire day is well spent preparing for the feast and undertaking some of Thanksgiving Day's nostalgic events. Thanksgiving is taken seriously and family members make every effort to show up or even at times introduce their girlfriends or boyfriends to the famrly(Coltran 1998, 21)
They include watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade either on a live stream on the television or a spot in the street at 9 am. Being a holiday, stores are usually open for the first half of the day, and a trip to the stores for last-minute ingredient shopping will sometimes happen between 10 am and noon. At noon it is customary for the president to grant one or two turkeys pardon from slaughter, and this we watch just before diving into watching football. Even though watching football games is a big part of the American Thanksgiving experience, it is a chance to cheer our favorite team and act as a distraction from the fact that we are likely not to have lunch in preparation for the hearty dinner.
There is no time limit for this, just as there is no time limit for the amount of cooking that happens. It takes a long time to cook a turkey, and sometimes the preparation for the meal could happen days prior. Being a celebration, it is no surprise that it has a big chunk of it solely focused on the eating when finally, dinner time rolls around; the rest of the activities were leading up to that moment. For Thanksgiving, everyone is invited to the table, except children do not typically stay up with the adults for long.
Division of labor& Social Activities
Most families have different traditions, and even though the end goal is to have a thanksgiving celebration, it is usually unique for every family. That is where the importance of the division of labor comes to play. Data gathering for culture development, as highlighted by Haviland, is crucial to ensure that all bases are covered (Haviland 2017, 55). For all purposes and intentions, the best at cooking something is always enlisted to prepare it. Ideally, the turkey will be prepared by the host for the night because they should have prepared at least a day before the material day.
Other family members will help make sure that the...