A Thanksgiving Tradition

Every Thanksgiving, I like to go ahead and rewatch the video for USA For Africa’s classic tribute song We Are The World, partially because it seems seasonally appropriate as we appreciate everything we have and think of how we can help others, and partially just because the inexplicable appearance of Dan Aykroyd at 4:23 or so never fails to make me laugh.

Here’s the tenuous Redskins connection, in case simple amusement isn’t enough of a reason for posting this: at 3:21, you can judge for yourself whether or not Fred Smoot and Chris Cooley are correct about Jason Campbell‘s resemblance to Lionel Richie. Enjoy.

Friday, November 28: A Good Day for Voting

Photo by Johnia! via Flickr

Ah, the day after Thanksgiving. A perfect time for standing in line outside a big box retailer for twenty hours in the freezing cold to save a hundred bucks on a BluRay player. You’re probably not at work today, and if you are you’re probably the only one there, killing time on the internet and trying not to be noticed.

Either way, it’s a perfect day to do some voting, so let’s quickly review the ongoing contests:

• This should post with a little under two hours left to vote Clinton Portis for FedEx Ground Player of the Week. Let’s see if a late surge can push him through.
• The world needs Fred Smoot’s story to be this year’s Super Bowl player ad; voting runs in this round until December 3.
• There are five Redskins fan videos in the running for the Super Bowl fan ad, so vote for one of them also.
• And, just in case you forgot, the Vote the Redskins Ticket campaign may have dialed down, but the Pro Bowl voting is still going.

See? Isn’t that a better way to spend Black Friday than fighting your way through the insane mall crowds?

Thursday, November 27: A Memory of Redskins Thanksgiving Past

I feel like I’ve mostly covered this year’s Redskins Thanksgiving: we’ve had Redskins giving and Redskins on turkey, which covers just about all aspects of the holiday except for the giant inflatable cartoon characters being dragged down the street. And Chris Cooley has also posted his reactions to the Harvest Feast, which are characteristically honest and uncharacteristically reflective.

The miracle of semi-random googling yields surprisingly few Redskins/Thanksgiving-related results — although there are some terrific-looking recipes for roasted redskin potatoes, and a number of articles about the Redskins fans “stuffing” the Pro Bowl ballot boxes.

And then it turns up this artifact from 2003, a list of things the fans of the 4-7 Redskins had to be thankful for back then. It’s … interesting, shall we say, to look and see how many of them turned out to be particularly accurate.

Some excerpts:

I Promised Myself the Title Wouldn’t Be “Redskins Talk Turkey”

It started with Lorenzo Alexander. I had asked him if he had anything specific planned for Thanksgiving, and he ran through pretty much the basic list of things: family, food, turkey, like that. So I asked, innocently enough, if he preferred his turkey roasted or fried, and he looked at me like I was crazy.

“Definitely fried,” he said, as if there was no other way to do it.

Shaun Suisham, who you may have heard is Canadian, pointed out that this is only his second Thanksgiving, but that he had had a roasted turkey last year that he really enjoyed. I mentioned that I don’t always love turkey, and now Alexander and Suisham BOTH looked at me like I was crazy.