Thanksgiving maskers were children who dressed up on the last Thursday of November and begged for fruit and money. (This was before Halloween was celebrated.) There was a large uproar about this practice - newspapers denounced parents who allowed their children to follow this "hooligan" practice. These children look like they were having fun!
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Bain News Service
Hooligans dressed as hooligans? These aren’t children dressed in Halloween costumes, but Thanksgiving maskers. Especially popular among New York City, children would wear often disturbing costumes, looking disheveled and homely, as they went door to door asking for sweets & pennies. By 1924, with the introduction of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Thanksgiving masking tradition slowly discontinued until eventually merging with the Halloween traditions of today.
My father told me that he did this as a child. He was a little boy in the 1940s and lived in Queens, NY. I have never known anyone that did this as a child. Thank you for posting!
Every generation had Their beautiful way of doing Halloween traditions some are kept some things has changed but never the Halloween it's self !!! Food for my thought!!
Food for thought is just a expession like water under the bridge don't fight with me boy life is to short for both of us I would not to walk in ur shoes or u in mine!!!!
My mother in law was born in 1918 , when she was a kid they dressed like hobos and went to the stores and yelled trick or treat. The store owners would either give them a loaf of bread, buns, something like that or for a trick they would put pennies on a metal pan on the heater, oven fire and then throw the hot pennies out on the sidewalk. The kids would get burnt picking up the hot pennies but, no one cared because everyone was so poor they would grab them anyway.
Yes it was done in Bushwick Brooklyn. Anythiong for thanksgiving? Pennies and candy. It was great fun. Bums and other mans clothes or womens and chaulk in socks to make a mess on the sidewalks and some walls. That was in the late forties into the fifties. Those were carefree days indeed.
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I am researching Tasker, Jones, Bowen, Rees of Wales; Kroetch, Chartrand of Canada; and Boggs, Ferguson, Smith, of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. Also Steeples of Kansas. And on my mother's New England roots - well, too numerous to name since she descends from Mayflower passengers as well as Dutch East India captains who arrived with their families before the Mayflower landed further north than was planned. :) I'm a Founder of AncientFaces and support the community answering questions & helping members make connections to the past (thus my official title of Founder & Content and Community Director). For me, it's been a labor of love for over 20 years. I truly believe with all of my heart that everyone should be remembered for generations to come.
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