Hi everyone, I'm Joanna.

And I'm Jenny.

And this is hyphenated, the podcast about living in the hyphen.

Jenny, it's Thanksgiving.

Can you believe it?

We call it sang-giving.

I used to think it was a saint.

Who's saint-giving?

Did you think it was spelled S-A-N-giving, sang-giving? I've spelled it so many different ways in my mind growing up.

That's one of them. Then there's sang-giving. So I know that right now there's a lot of conversations

about why Thanksgiving is controversial for obvious reasons. You know, we would dress up as pilgrims and

quote-unquote Indians and pretend that, you know, they really dress up as pilgrims and quote unquote Indians and pretend that,

you know, they really did have a wonderful, peaceful feast when there was an actual genocide.

But Thanksgiving was controversial since its inception, but not for the reasons it's controversial

now. And Thanksgiving has been around forever, you know, since the 1600s with the Plymouth Rock or whatever,

but it wasn't an actual holiday until Abe Lincoln signed it in as like a national holiday.

So because of that, the South of the United States saw Thanksgiving as like a culture war,

like a straight up war on southern values, you know, and

these northern abolitionists are trying to have us all give thanks on the same day. And then in the

1700s, as people were moving west in the states, and by the way, taking land from the natives,

they took these traditions with them. But it wasn't really until the Civil War that we had

one clear day that Thanksgiving is on. Because before George Washington was like, oh, you know,

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