holidays

 

Thanksgiving Mythology

Theorizing Thanksgiving:

Some Fun History:

Cigarette Advertising, on this Holiday:

Thanksgiving, Race, and Gender:

Five minutes for fun facts on this almost-Thanksgiving day in the US. Some of my favorites:

  • Stuffing goes back to at least the 4th century CE.
  • Potatoes are truly an American tuber; it’s grown in every 50 states.
  • Corn is a flower.
  • Meat pies preceded desert pies and they were called “coffins.”
  • In case you need a 15th century aphrodisiac recipe: boiled peas and onions sprinkled with cinnamon, ginger, and cardamon.
  • The average American eats between 3,000 and 5,000 calories at Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanks Mental Floss!

Enjoy!

I don’t know for sure what holidays are like at your house, but if they resemble holidays at my house, and most houses in the US, women do almost all of the holiday preparation: decorating, gift buying and wrapping, invitations, neighborhood and church activities, cooking, cooking, more cooking, and cleaning.

Holidays are moments in the year when women, specifically, have extra responsibilities. I distinctly remember my own beloved stepmother telling me — stress making her voice taut — that she just wanted everyone to have a nice Thanksgiving. She would work herself silly to do and have all the right things so that everyone else would have a good time. Multiple this by 10 at Christmas.

This Bed, Bath, & Beyond ad, sent in by Jessica E. and Jessica S., reminded me of the crazy workload that accompanies holidays for women:

Picture_1Alone with the responsibility of making a holiday for everyone else, the woman manages to mobilize technology and goods from BB&B to make it happen. Ironically, the text reads: “When you need a hand with holiday entertaining,” but actual human help in the form of hands is absent. Apparently it’s easier for women to grow five extra arms than it is to get kids and adult men to pitch in.

Anyhoo, be a peach and give your mom a hand this holiday season.

Originally published in 2009.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

6a00d83451ccbc69e2010536215b89970bPre-prepared frozen meals pre-dated the Swanson “TV dinner,” but it was Swanson who brought the aluminum tray — previously only seen in taverns and airplanes — into the home.

They were motivated by opportunity and necessity. The necessity went something like this, or so the story goes: After the 1953 Thanksgiving holiday, Swanson found themselves up to their ears in turkey. They had overestimated demand, and there they were, with 260 tons of frozen turkey and the next bird holiday 364 days away. So, they slapped together a frozen turkey dinner, with peas and mashed potatoes, and held their breath.

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The opportunity was the meteoric rise of living room television sets. In 1950, only 9% of American households had TVs. By 1953, 45% of households had one. The next year, that number would rise to 56%. Swanson’s overstock of turkeys occurred at exactly the same moment that owning a television became the new hot thing. So, Swanson tied their advertising directly to TV watching, inventing the phrase “TV dinner.”

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Rumor is that Swanson wasn’t optimistic, but the dinners outsold their expectations. They planned to sell 5,000 turkey TV dinners that first year, in 1954, but they ended up selling 10 million.

So, if you celebrate Thanksgiving and are eating a TV dinner tonight instead of a whole bird, know that you, too, are part of a true American tradition.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The practice of pairing the word “men” (which refers to adults) with “girls” (which does not) reinforces a gender hierarchy by mapping it onto age.  Jason S. discovered an example of this tendency at Halloween Adventure (East Village, NYC) and snapped a picture to send in:

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Sara P. found another example, this time from iparty.  The flyer puts a girl and a boy side-by-side in police officer costumes.  The boy’s is labeled “policeman” and the girl’s is labeled “police girl.”

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This type of language often goes unnoticed, but it sends a ubiquitous gender message about how seriously we should take men and women.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In 2012, I wrote about the heteronormativity in the couples Halloween costume category at Party City. Now, it’s 2015 and Party City has changed.

I counted all 103 costume sets, dividing them into whether they featured a heterosexual couple, a man-man couple, a woman-woman couple, or were ambiguous. Among them, 74 were aimed at heterosexuals, 12 were for men with men, and 3 were for women with women.

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It might be too strong to say that the heteronormativity is gone. There are still more man-woman couples represented than man-man or woman-woman couples, but they’re very centrally there.

This makes people in similar-sex couples more visible. It also has the interesting effect of making some costumes not-so-obviously heterosexual anymore, like the bears or the Ghostbuster costumes. I counted 14 that were at least a little ambiguous as to whether they were intended for a similar-sex or other-sex couple.

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Party City is not doing anything overly clever. Clearly they’re just looking for costumes they already have and putting them in combinations that might sell. And they could do a better job about thinking up woman-woman sets. But, there they are. And that’s a real change.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Research on college student alcohol consumption shows that they drink significantly more when they link their drinking to a reason to celebrate. Halloween is one of the many “alcoholidays” that occur throughout the school year.

Psychologist Kent Glindemann and colleagues took measures of the blood alcohol concentration of college students on Halloween and a comparative non-holiday. As a measure of their investment in the celebration, the researchers also indicated whether the student was in costume on Halloween and asked the subject how much time and effort they spent putting it together.

They found that students on Halloween were significantly more intoxicated than they were on the non-holiday, significantly more intoxicated if they were in costume, and significantly more intoxicated if they had invested more versus less time in their appearance.

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Glindemann and his colleagues theorize that the Halloween costume mediates the intent to celebrate, but costumes may also have an independent effect. Social work professor John D. Clapp and his colleagues studied non-holiday-related college parties. Such parties often have themes that encourage students to dress up. In theory, the themes apply to all students but in practice women dress up far more often than men.

Clapp and his colleagues found that women tested at themed parties had higher rates of intoxication than women at non-theme parties. Women may be de-inhibited by the costumes themselves or the costumes may make the party feel more like an alcoholiday.

Happy Halloween everybody! Celebrate safely!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

“Future research is needed to identify the process,” write the authors, but it appears that pregnant women have some control over when they give birth. A study of birth incidence on Halloween and Valentine’s Day, by public health scholar Becca Levy and colleagues, showed that spontaneous births dipped on the former and rose on the latter.

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The authors suggest that this contributes to growing evidence that culture influences birth timing. Women’s bodies resist giving birth on a day associated with fright and death, but give into birth on a day associated with love. The authors recommend extra staffing on obstetric wards on Valentine’s Day and sending a few more doctors and nurses into the streets on Halloween.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.