Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Or, to be more precise, happy day after Thanksgiving. As I was cooking yesterday, I was mildly stressing out about whether I would have time to post this on the actual day. Then it occurred to me that it was highly unlikely that anyone would stop in the middle of cooking, eating, watching football, or whatever and say to their loved ones, “I have to check to see if there are any late-breaking blog posts.”
In previous years, I gave thanks for ten of my favorite people from 1918, ten of my favorite illustrators from 1919, three of my favorite women illustrators from 1920 (Neesa McMein turned out to have had such a fascinating life that that was all I could manage), and, in 2021, the friends I’ve made over the course of this project. (I skipped Thanksgiving—the post, not the holiday—in 2022.) This year I decided to focus on how Thanksgiving was celebrated on the covers of 1923 magazines.
J.C. Leyendecker is best known for his New Year’s babies, but his Thanksgiving covers were also a regular feature at the Saturday Evening Post. This one is titled “Trading for a Turkey.” Thanksgiving is a more fraught holiday than New Year’s, though, and, even though the story about the Dutch buying the island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24 worth of beads turns out not to be true, this reminder of it still made me uncomfortable.
Speaking of the New Year’s babies, this J.F. Kernan Country Gentleman cover recalls Leyendecker’s 1922 cover, also featuring a bird’s tail being salted.
For those of you who haven’t been following along, salting a bird’s tail is supposed to render it temporarily incapable of flying. So the New Year’s baby is trying to make sure the dove of peace doesn’t fly away. The Country Gentleman boy is presumably, more prosaically, trying to get the bird to stay still so he can eat it for Thanksgiving dinner. Or maybe he’s just pre-salting it.
With Leyendecker doing the honors at the Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell was over at Life depicting a svelte Pilgrim in the stocks for gluttony.
Rival humor magazine Life took a more risqué approach to the holiday with an Enoch Bolles cover titled “Turkey with Very Little Dressing.”*
That was all I could find as far as actual Thanksgiving covers go, but this Fruit, Garden and Home cover has a nice autumn feel.**
And last but not least, happy 50th anniversary to St. Nicholas magazine! “Is there any doubt that in the thoughts of thousands and thousands, old and young, who have read and to-day are reading its pages, ST. NICHOLAS will be numbered among the blessings for which they are grateful on Thanksgiving day?” the magazine asks, not stopping to wait for an answer.***
As for me, I’ll take a moment to give thanks for the wonderful magazines of 1923–yes, including you, St. Nicholas!
*When I was working on the post on summer 1923 magazine covers, I went down a research rabbit hole about Enoch Bolles (whose Judge cover I didn’t end up using) and learned that we were once neighbors of sorts—he was a long-term patient at a psychiatric hospital a few miles away from where my family lived in New Jersey in the 1960s.
**Again for those of you who haven’t been following along, this excellent title was changed to Better Homes and Gardens in 1924.
***Speaking of rabbit holes, I tried to figure out the vintage of the magazine (presumably from her own childhood) that the woman is reading, and therefore whether she is Mom or Grandma, but I couldn’t find any covers that resembled this one.
New on our podcast, Rereading Our Childhood:
My Life 100 Years Ago 