the times | Thursday November 26 2020 1GM 17
News
Britain has already embraced Hallow-
een, Black Friday, prom nights and baby
showers so it is perhaps no great sur-
prise that Thanksgiving is the latest
American custom apparently being
adopted this side of the Atlantic.
The supermarket chain Waitrose
says that record numbers of people in
Britain will celebrate the US national
holiday today despite it having only a
tenuous connection to the UK.
It reported that searches for
“Thanksgiving” on its website have in-
creased more than tenfold this year,
while orders for Thanksgiving turkeys
are up 37 per cent.
America’s modern Thanksgiving tra-
dition is traced to a feast held in New
Plymouth in 1621 when English Pilgrim
migrants invited native American Indi-
ans to join them in celebrating a
successful harvest. Members of the
Wampanoag tribe had helped the Pil-
grims to survive the previous winter by
giving them food.
A traditional Thanksgiving dinner
patrick kiddTMS
[email protected] | @timesdiaryLast laugh for
the Treasury
Margaret Thatcher once joked, rare
for her, that “to borrow and to
borrow and to borrow” sounded
like “Macbeth with a heavy cold”.
Now it is Tory policy, to the
frustration of Liam Byrne, the
Labour chief secretary to the
Treasury who left a note for his
successor on leaving office in 2010
that was ruthlessly exploited by
George Osborne. “I’m afraid there
is no money, good luck,” it said,
which the Tories often deployed to
mock Labour’s profligacy. Byrne
still stings that a private joke was
made public. “I thought I was
honouring a Treasury tradition
that goes back to Churchill,” he told
Times Radio. Informed by David
Gauke, who did the job in 2016-17,
that chief secretaries no longer left
handover notes, even for party
colleagues, Byrne sighed: “I ruined
the tradition for everybody.” He
now hopes to escape Westminster
as Labour’s candidate for mayor of
the West Midlands, leaving Rishi
Sunak, like a fiscal Nero, to fiddle
as Byrne roams.face up to old age
Now he is 82, Sir Anthony Hopkins
feels confident to say that people
just want to see him playing
himself. Hopkins, below, told an
American newspaper that “no
acting was required” for his latest
film, The Father. As a warning
against overdoing the make-
believe, he then told a story about
Spencer Tracy seeing Laurence
Olivier in Titus Andronicus on the
London stage. Olivier wore heavy
make-up and a false nose,
which worried Tracy. “Larry,
who do you think they think
you are?” he asked. “The
audience knows it’s you.”Tracy himself dispensed
with make-up to play
Dr Jekyll and Mr
Hyde in the 1941 film,believing that he could portray the
discrete characters by the power of
his acting. It didn’t impress Somerset
Maugham, who watched Tracy film
a scene from the side and then
asked the director in a loud voice:
“Which one is he now?”this wine tastes funny
The comedian Dara O’Briain says
the secret to writing is to drink
enough to remove inhibitions
without going too far. “The best
time is two glasses of wine in,” he
says. “Then there’s a window of
being very funny on glasses 3 and- Glasses 5 and 6 are you sitting
back saying ‘God, I was funny on
glass 3’. ” He reminds me of a boast
of Nigel Farage that he was such a
professional politician he would
never broadcast after the fifth pint.
The demise of the cricket tea, as
reported yesterday, reminded Bill
Mouland, a reader, of the service his
wife performed for his side in the
1970s. “She was charged with
making liver sausage and raw onion
sandwiches for our fierce fast
bowler, Alan,” he said. “No one came
near him as a result.” And when
Alan turned and bellowed “Owzat?”
at the umpire, up came the finger
quickly “if only to cover his nose”.stone me, kids today
Even the Ice Age is racist now.
Students at the University of
Wisconsin are upset about a
two-billion-year-old hunk of
igneous ore called the Chamberlin
Rock, which was deposited on their
future campus by a glacier and dug
up in 1925. Regrettably, it was
described with a racial slur in a
newspaper of the time and though
the college has found no further
use of that word to describe it in
print the damage has been done.
Devastated students want it
moved, at a cost of about
£50,000, if not obliterated. I
miss the days when young
people wanting to get their
rocks off meant
something else.Britons give thanks for any excuse to celebrate
Andrew Ellson
Consumer Affairs Correspondent
consists of roast turkey, stuffing,
mashed potatoes, green beans, corn,
white baps, gravy, cranberry sauce and
pumpkin pie.
Waitrose said the trend of marking
the US holiday in Britain had been
growing steadily but had accelerated
this year because people were stuck at
home and desperate to celebrate some-
thing. It also said that views of Thanks-
giving recipes on Waitrose.com had
risen sharply this year, with searches
for instructions on how to make pecan
pie up 364 per cent and pumpkin pie up
232 per cent.
Britons are even turning to tradition-
ally American drinks to celebrate the
occasion, with sales of bourbon up 45
per cent year on year in the past week.
Waitrose believes that travel restric-
tions imposed because of the pandemic
mean that fewer Americans living in
the UK will return home this year,
meaning more celebrations here.
Beth Elliot, a brand manager at the
supermarket chain, said: “Thanks-
giving will definitely be different this
year, with many people unable to travel
to be with friends and family, so we areseeing an increase in celebrations
across the UK. As customers look for
more reasons to celebrate and have fun
at home due to lockdown restrictions,
Thanksgiving offers the perfect excuse
for a fun feast with the family at home
— be it in person or via Zoom.”
The tradition is far from being an ex-
clusively American invention. Prayers
of thanks and other thanksgiving cere-
monies are common among almost all
religions and nationalities after har-
vests. Original Thanksgiving celebra-
tions in 17th century America were also
rooted in English traditions dating
from the Protestant Reformation.
Research suggests that Coventry isthe centre of Thanksgiving celebra-
tions in the UK, closely
followed by
London. A blog
on the Coven-
try University
website offers ad-
vice to residents
on how to celebrate
the day, although it
suggests buying a
turkey from Lidl rather
than Waitrose.
American Thanksgiv-ing is celebrated on the fourth Thurs-
day in November. The following day,
Black Friday, when retailers in the US
have always offered discounts to
lure shoppers out after the
national holiday, has also
been widely adopted
in Britain.
This year shop-
pers in the UK are
expected to spend
more than £7.5 billion
snapping up “deals”
offered by most of
the big retailers.
Expert verdicts on
Black Friday offers, TimesWaitrose has done a brisk
trade in turkeys this month