An underappreciated Thanksgiving tradition

As many may know, there are some timeless Thanksgiving traditions. Of course, eating enormous amounts of food goes all the way back to Plymouth Rock, and the experience of the Pilgrims who settled New England back in the 17th century. Naturally, Thanksgiving also represents getting together with family, the official beginning of the Christmas shopping season and last but not least, the Detroit Lions losing another football game.

But there’s an unappreciated Thanksgiving tradition that I’d like to speak about. If one flips through their local radio stations on Thanksgiving Day, they may stumble upon a somewhat rambling spoken word folk song. The song that I speak of is “Alice’s Restaurant.” Released in 1967, the playing Arlo Guthrie’s 18-minute opus to the anti-war movement has been a long-standing tradition of Thanksgiving Day.

The song is named after a restaurant in Stockbridge Mass., owned by a woman named Alice M. Brock, who owned a restaurant in town. While the song is named “Alice’s Restaurant,” it is not completely accurate in the context of the song because Alice had her Thanksgiving dinner annually at her house, a deconsecrated church that she had purchased a few years earlier.

The song itself, tells the true story of how Guthrie was arrested on Thanksgiving Day in 1965 for illegally dumping some of Alice’s garbage at the town dump, which was closed for the holiday. He was taken to jail afterwards for “causing a disturbance.” Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins were told to take the garbage back from the dump and were fined $50 each for breaking the law.

Afterwards, the song transitions into an anti-war protest song. Guthrie tells of being sent to Whitehall Street in New York City, the location of the induction center, after being drafted into the military. In particular, he explains how the events that happened in Stockbridge prevented him from ever seeing Vietnam.

“I’m sittin’ here on the Group W bench ‘cause you want to know if I’m moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein’ a litterbug?”

The humorous thing that one learns at the end of this song is that merely a small malfeasance, such as littering, prevented Guthrie from being put into the military.

For a long time, especially prior to middle school, I remember wondering why most radio stations played this song on Thanksgiving. But nowadays, it’s a truly wonderful Thanksgiving tradition, though probably a little bit underappreciated by much of the population.

In conclusion, if you find yourself flipping through radio stations on Thanksgiving and you come across a long, rambling folk song, you may be interested in stopping for this song. This tradition is a true piece of Americana and really adds to the uniqueness of the Thanksgiving holiday.