While Thanksgiving is celebrated in different ways at various colleges, here are five schools that have created annual traditions for students.
Obama Turkey ‘Pardon’ Not Good Enough For PETA:
t’s just not good enough for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that the White House symbolically pardons two massive turkeys on the eve of each Thanksgiving.
Now PETA wants to retire the word pardon.
At issue: Pardons are used to free crooks. And, they say, the birds are innocent victims.
President Obama grants a pardon to ‘Apple’, the National Thanksgiving Turkey.
A Happy Thanksgiving to all!
"I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union."
"The tradition of ‘pardoning’ White House turkeys has been traced to President Abraham Lincoln’s clemency to a turkey recorded in an 1865 dispatch by White House reporter Noah Brooks who noted, ‘About a year before, a live turkey had been brought home for the Christmas dinner, but [Lincoln’s son Tad] interceded in behalf of its life… . [Tad’s] plea was admitted and the turkey’s life spared.’"
— Washington Whispers - Who Dreamed Up Pardoning White House Turkeys?
