Right. Thanksgiving is on Thursday. But you know that, don’t you. You’ve been planning this all year. Hopefully you’ve got everything sorted, because we’re closed on Thursday and Friday, so you’d better be ready. You’ve got 2 days to pick up last minute stuff, like Paxo stuffing, or delicious Yorkshire puddings, Bisto gravy and ready made roast potatoes. All available, here at The Queens Pantry until Wednesday evening. Take the cooking stress out of Thanksgiving Dinner and allow yourself to focus solely on family tensions.

We don’t do the Thanksgiving Holiday thing in the UK, even though we invented it (we did, I’ll tell you in a minute). We are, however, grateful, on a daily basis for many things. Giving America back for one. That’s up there. Boris Johnson not being in charge anymore. Thank God. Football. Jaffa Cakes. Ripples. Frazzles. Humour. Spelt correctly. Grateful for that. We try to get an attitude of gratitude every day. But you lot, well, you need a special day to remind yourself how lucky you are that we invented you.

Here’s the history bit. Bad boy King Henry VIII (see Henry VIII blog), not content with banging off his wives heads, and fighting anyone who looked at him funny, started the Reformation in 1536. He didn’t like the Pope, so started his own church, the Church of England, and did what he wanted. At the time, there were 95 Church holidays a year, plus the 52 Sundays, so 147 days of the year not doing anything. That's 40% of the time sitting about in a church, singing, praying and telling yourself off for smiling and having fun every now and then. So Henry cut them down to 27, with the rest being put aside for Thanksgiving Days. So disasters, or blessings from God, were set aside and celebrated as a Thanksgiving Day. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was an example, as was the birth of Queen Anne in 1605.

So fast forward a bit. In 1619, the ship Margaret sailed from Bristol to Virginia under Captain John Woodliffe and brought thirty-eight settlers to the new settlement of Berkeley Hundred. The London Company proprietors instructed the settlers that "the day of our ships arrival . . . shall be yearly and perpetually kept as a day of Thanksgiving." The Margaret landed her passengers at Berkeley Hundred on December 4, 1619. The settlers did indeed celebrate a day of "Thanksgiving", establishing the tradition two years and 17 days before the Pilgrim Fathers, who were a experimental jazz fusion folk band, arrived aboard the Mayflower at Plymouth, Massachusetts to establish their Thanksgiving Day in 1621. I think this is the bit where your history starts. Everything else before that is some twaddle made up about the Indigenous people waiting for ‘the longpigs’ to turn up and relieve their boredom with cigarettes, alcohol and gambling.

So Thanksgiving has been celebrated since then. Oh. Yeah. You have turkey at Thanksgiving. The reason it’s turkey is because every other animal is useful in other ways. Cows make milk. And shoes. And handbags. Chickens make eggs. Sheep help you fall asleep. Pigs eat s…Turkeys though. They don’t do anything else, do they, other than waddle around giving it the big un. And every year 46 million of the piss-taking gits get it. That’ll learn ‘em. 46 million of them, except 1. Every year 1 turkey is pardoned by the President. In 2021 the name of the turkey pardoned by Trump was Steve Bannon.

And check it out. There is a selection process. About 10 or 20 turkeys are chosen, from the flock of the chairperson of the National Turkey Federation, and they are trained to become acclimated to handle loud noises, flash photography and large crowds that will gather at the White House lawn. And they say it’s the one that handles that situation the best that gets pardoned. But the real truth is it’s the one with the best g......