36 Days to Football: Thanksgiving Is an Underrated Holiday

Most weekdays from now until the Packers and Seahawks kick off on September 4th, The Big Lead will detail one reason we are excited for football season to begin. Including today, we’re 29 days away from NCAA and 36 from NFL.

There are two holidays that are quintessentially American — July 4th and Thanksgiving — and they’re probably my two favorite holidays of the year. Both of them typically involve gluttonous eating (while it’s not necessarily a staple of the 4th of July, that always ends up being how I celebrate it). Although July 4th is accompanied by fireworks, Thanksgiving has football.

Once or twice a year, I’ll complain that there aren’t any good YouTube clips of John Madden salivating over a turducken. The closest things to that existing are an audio retrospective on Thanksgivings past from 2012, a Frank Caliendo impression of it, and a Madden-authored piece in the Chicago Tribune from 2001. The Internet should be better than that; hopefully somebody who’s reading this has a VHS lying around of some game that had to be recorded during dinner, and is aptly motivated to put it up online.

Nevertheless, Madden’s infectious enthusiasm helped breed a love for that holiday when I was younger, and it’s stuck with me. It does admittedly feel a little bit weird to be waxing poetic about Thanksgiving when it’s so nice outside right now — especially after the winter many of just had — but I can’t help myself. (And, Thanksgiving straddles the border between thick hoodie season and begrudgingly wearing a winter coat, which I hold out on for as long as possible.)

This year, the Thanksgiving match-ups are Bears at Lions, Eagles at Cowboys, and Seahawks at 49ers. The latter game especially promises to be a great game for which to eat a leftover turkey sandwich, pour a glass of bourbon, and curl up on the couch with a blanket. The Black Friday horror show will be impending, but it will still seem far away.