Thanksgiving Rum!

We all pass out on the couch from alcohol rather than tryptofan?

Seriously, though, I doubt the Puritans will be to much up to Rum-bashes.
 
Inspired by a misreading of this thread, what if the traditional American thanksgiving meal featured Rum, not Turkey?

Rum was not produced in ancient New England.

I'm not american, but I think Thanskgiving food is a mix of amerindian food and european food, and amerindian and Pilgrims were not very fond of alcools...
 
I said the traditional Thanksgiving dinner - which is certainly not the Puritan dinner, and which doesn't necessarily have to be connected to it. The founding myth behind modern American Thanksgiving could just be a general celebration of the harvest; there's no need to specifically link Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims.

In New England, turkey became a core part of the Thanksgiving meal by 1857; I'm not entirely sure when this became national.

We'll need to change attitudes about alcohol fairly significantly, of course - rum would need to be seen as fundamentally American, not as a sign of lower-class rowdiness. Maybe if the US grabbed Bermuda and/or the Bahamas in the Revolutionary War? I'm not sure how long American rum would last against American whiskey, though it would probably last longer than British rum did...

Incidentally, Boston had a rum distillery as early as 1667.
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Prohibitionists are going to have a somewhat tougher battle to fight if rum is seen as a key part of celebrating Thanksgiving.
 
IIRC Rum was the popular American drink until roughly Independence, when it switched to whiskey as something that could be made at home and not imported from Those Evil British.


Edit: the real point of this thread:

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True, which is why I'm proposing to give the US Bermuda and/or the Bahamas (so that it has significant domestic rum production) in the Revolutionary War. Still, it'll have a problematic image, especially as temperance movements gather steam.

I could see rum being the centerpiece of a Southern thanksgiving tradition - less New England moralism and piety (in the 19th century, when the holiday began to coalesce into a national holiday), and fewer turkeys, make it more viable there than in New England. Not sure how to extend it into an all-American tradition, though.
 
Anyway, does anybody know why a tukey is called a turkey?

I expect that this caused a lot of problems during the Great War, having to declare war against your own national bird :D
 
Anyway, does anybody know why a tukey is called a turkey?

I expect that this caused a lot of problems during the Great War, having to declare war against your own national bird :D
Mostly because of the confusion of exotic places.

There's some suggestion the first Meleagris gallapavo reached England via the Ottoman Empire. One source said that maize was originally called Turkish wheat, for the same reason.

Guinea fowl and Guinea pigs don't come from Guinea (and the latter aren't aren't pigs).

Turkeys don't come from Turkey

Indians (i.e. aboriginals from the Americas) are from India

Aborginals aren't (i.e. 'indians' and 'abos' are immigrants to the Americas and Australia, albeit thousands of years ago).

etc., etc.

Cultivated Wild Rice isn't wild....
 
Maybe if Jamaica joins the original 13 colonies in revolution Rum would be given some greater significance to remind the other colonies of their Caribbean state.
 
Mostly because of the confusion of exotic places.

There's some suggestion the first Meleagris gallapavo reached England via the Ottoman Empire. One source said that maize was originally called Turkish wheat, for the same reason.

Maize in French is ble d'inde (Indian wheat)

turkey, the bird, was originally poulet d'inde (fowl/chicken of India) and now just dinde.

India and Indian referring to the Americas of course.
 
Rum was not produced in ancient New England.

I'm not american, but I think Thanskgiving food is a mix of amerindian food and european food, and amerindian and Pilgrims were not very fond of alcools...

Actually, possibly the main reason why the Pilgrims landed where they did instead of continuing on to Virginia (as they had originally planned to do) was that they ran out of beer. They couldn't brew more on board ship, so they said, "This be the place!" :D They were pious Christians, but they weren't teetotalers. The Temperance movement was a later development, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
 
Rum was not produced in ancient New England.

I'm not american, but I think Thanskgiving food is a mix of amerindian food and european food, and amerindian and Pilgrims were not very fond of alcools...

The Thanksgiving feast is really a nineteenth century tradition, so it consists of an 1860s idea of what the pilgrims would have eaten rather than the real thing. That explains why there's no rum (or whiskey) involved - demon alcohol and all that. The supposed original feast probably didn't include any liquor. Where would they have taken it from? But in the 17th and 18th century, it probably would have, and a tradition surviving from then may well carry it onwards. Rum was popular and relatively cheap on the eastern seaboard (Jamaica Plains isn't called that for nothing), and if you look at frex the Christmas traditions of some European countries (dating to the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries), rum does feature there. Of course, the USA has a less easygoing attitude to alcohol, so any Thanksgiving rum may simply be expunged from the tradition.
 
Wasn't the South generally less concerned by demon alcohol and all that? Or was that just an antebellum thing? To be fair, conceivably, the Civil War could've been avoided, especially if slavery had been abandoned in the upper South (MD, DE, VA, maybe NC).

I think that if you could get a Thanksgiving derived from the South, rather than from New England, Thanksgiving Rum is a possibility.
 
One interesting thing is that before independence, Rum distilling was one of the key areas of the New England economy (hence why the Sugar Act was such a trouble), so it isn't totally out of the question for Rum to become a traditional drink of the Americas.
 
Rum as a traditional drink probably means a weaker prohibitionist movement, and may mean a weaker progressive movement in general (since the progressives and other reformer-types were linked with the prohibitionists). Stronger conservatism in the 1910s?
 
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