Answer: What and why are Thanksgiving traditions?

Ooops. 

I wrote the Thanksgiving SRS Challenge before answering the previous one (about  California fire data).  I'll answer that one later this week to catch up.  But today, let's talk about Thanksgiving.  

A painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris titled 'The First Thanksgiving' shows pilgrims and Native Americans gathering to share a meal. Copyright Library of Congress (CC by Attribution)  As we learned in an earlier SRS post, the first Thanksgiving probably wasn't really like this. 

As you recall, the Challenges this week were apparently fairly simple.  Here are the questions and what I did to find answer to each... 

1.  I know Canada and the US celebrate Thanksgiving each fall.  But do any other countries celebrate Thanksgiving (or equivalent holidays) as well?  If so, what are they called, and when are they celebrated? 

2.  What Thanksgiving (and equivalent) traditions do different countries have?  (I bet they don't all eat turkey with cranberry sauce... that's particularly North American.)   

3.  Speaking of ritual foods (turkey, cranberries, etc.)... what ritual songs are associated with the holidays?  Many other holidays have associated songs--why not Thanksgiving?  What am I missing? 

Here's what I did to answer these Challenges.... 


My first query was: 

     [ countries that celebrate Thanksgiving ] 

Which gave me this result:  

If you follow the link to the MentalFloss.com page, you'll learn that they have 7 countries listed.  

1. Germany (first Sunday of October).  Erntedankfest is a harvest festival to give thanks for a good harvest.  Preferred foods are specially fattened up chickens (die Masthünchen) and hens (die Poularde), capons, and geese.
 

2. Japan Kinrō Kansha no Hi the Japanese feast day on November 23. Originally from ancient harvest festival rituals named Niinamesai, the modern meaning is a celebration of hard work and community involvement.
 

3. Canada – much like the US version but on a different day.  Canada celebrates Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October.  (In French, it’s  l'Action de grâce.)  It was first celebrated in 1578, when English explorer Martin Frobisher gave thanks in present-day Nunavut. Parliament made it a national holiday in 1879.
 

4. Grenada version of Thanksgiving is held on October 25 every year, Grenada's Thanksgiving marks the anniversary of the 1983 U.S. military invasion to restore order after the death of communist leader Maurice Bishop. American soldiers who were stationed in the country told the locals about the upcoming US Thanksgiving holiday. To show their own gratitude, Grenadians surprised the soldiers with meals like those they described, complete with turkey and all the fixings.
 

5. Liberia celebrates a version of the US Thanksgiving (recall that Liberia was founded in the 19^th century by freed slaves from the U.S.  Here, it’s celebrated with cornucopias (literally!) of fruit baskets (bananas, papayas, mangoes, and pineapples).
 

6. Leiden (in the Netherlands) celebrates a version of Thanksgiving in recognition of the early Dutch migrants who left Leiden in the early 1600 for the New World.  Today, the people of Leiden celebrate a Thanksgiving day on the fourth Thursday of November with cookies and coffee following a non-demoninational church service.
 

7.  Norfolk Island (a remote island in the South Pacific between near Australia also owes its Thanksgiving holiday to visiting U.S. whalers visiting the region in the middle 1890s.  Today, on the last Wednesday of November, the locals bring fruit and vegetables to the church to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. 

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But if you change the query slightly (change "countries" to "nations") you'll find that the result says that there are 9 countries that celebrate some form of Thanksgiving.  

     [ nations that celebrate thanksgiving ] 

In this result (from Yahoo.com), there are a couple of additions: 


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8.  China celebrates an annual holiday ("Chung Chiu") on the 15th day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar (in 2018, it was on September 24). The celebration, known as the Mid-Autumn Festival, typically falls in late September or early October, when the moon is big and bright. (Note that the Chinese holiday is much older than the American version. The holiday’s roots can be traced back more than 2,500 years, long before Europeans ever set foot in the new world.) 

 9.  South Korea celebrates  a holiday known as Chuseok Day.  Held in mid-to-late September, it’s a family holiday with a meal together and special memories of ancestors. 

So... why the differences?  Because each answer is generated by extracting a block of text (an "answer") to a question (that is, your query) that best matches.  In this case, the difference between nation and country was enough to find two rather different answers from question-answering pages.  

If you keep varying the details of the queries, you'll find a bunch of other harvest-time traditions.  As you read, you have to ask yourself... what actually counts as a Thanksgiving festival?  

For instance, it's pretty clear that place like the Phillipines, Viet Nam, and Saint Lucia all have roughly equivalent holidays.  Places like Brazil have a holiday called "Dia de Ao de Graas" which is also held on the fourth Thursday in November--but it's not celebrated by the entire nation.  So.. is that a Thanksgiving holiday, or no?  Likewise, Malaysia celebrates  the Kadazan Harvest festival.  

These area all harvest parties / holidays of one form or another.  Whether or not you call them all Thanksgiving is up to you.  I'm thankful they're all there.  (I hope to visit a few over the next couple of years!)  

And of COURSE I did [ Thanksgiving Wikipedia ] to see what the Wiki sources said.  (It was interesting, but not profoundly different than what I found with these queries.)  


The last question (about Thanksgiving songs) was a huge surprise, although it was a simple query:  

     [ Thanksgiving songs ] 

that led me to this relatively full set of songs!  

I certainly had no idea that there were so many Thanksgiving songs.  Perhaps we need to start a new tradition of Thanksgiving caroling!  

Of course, seeing this made me wonder about the history of Thanksgiving songs, so I did a bit more exploring.  Searching with this query on Google Books gives a nice set of scanned songs (here I quoted the phrase to give me high quality results on just that phrase):  

and when did the query: 

     [ Thanksgiving music site:LOC.gov ] 

I found that there was a long tradition of Thanksgiving music, now lovingly preserved in the Library of Congress archives.  

While searching through this list of songs, I managed to stumble across this intriguing entry: 

... which points out that (this is an excerpt from the card): 

"In general, it would look as if music played a less important function in celebrating Thanksgiving than it does at Christmas and Easter.  Most hymn books, of course, have harvest and Thanksgiving hymns and there is a scattering of anthems and cantatas.  Unfortunately, few of these appear in our card catalog, and we have found no bibliography of the subject, either compiled here or elsewhere…. But in general, digging for material on the subject is likely to be frustrating and unrewarding…"

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Of course, now that we live in an Internet age,  it's pretty easy to do a search on Google Books for: 

     [ Thanksgiving hymnal ] 

and find LOTS of hymns of Thanksgiving, such as this one from the Congregational Psalmist Hymnal (1886): 

Even Wikipedia had a section on Thanksgiving songs.  Who knew?  

Research Lessons  

A few search lessons to emphasize here: 

1. Vary the search terms.  As you saw, "nation" vs. "country" can give different results.  As a general strategy, I often will do slightly different versions of a query in order to get a sense of the range of answers.  I rarely do only one query.  

2. Read widely.  In keeping with the "vary the query" suggestion, read more than one result.  It's worth checking out all of the results on the first page (at least read the snippets).  You can do this quickly by opening up several of the results in parallel tabs.  (CMD+click on a link on a Mac opens the link in a new tab.  Right click or CONTROL+click on a PC.)  

3. Always check Wikipedia for breadth.   It's easy and quick... and sometimes you'll get surprised.  

4. When searching for historical topics, check historical sites.  I did this by searching in Google Books, and in particular, checking for hymnals on the Books site to get a sense of the depth of the topic.  And, in particular, checking the site:LOC.gov is a fast and handy way to get another perspective on your topic from an archivist's eye.  


Search on!  

SearchResearch Challenge (11/22/18): What and why are Thanksgiving traditions?

I love pumpkin pie. 

I like it so much that I baked two pumpkin pies yesterday for Thanksgiving.  Well... truthfully, one is for Thanksgiving, and one is for my birthday celebration, which always gets tangled up with the Thanksgiving festivities.  (Truthfully, I've had pumpkin pie for my birthday instead of cake for the past few decades. That's how much I like it.) 

A painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris titled 'The First Thanksgiving' shows pilgrims and Native Americans gathering to share a meal. Copyright Library of Congress (CC by Attribution)  As we learned in an earlier SRS post, the first Thanksgiving probably wasn't really like this. 

As I baked, I remembered that I'd sent "Happy Thanksgiving" notes to my Canadian friends back in early October.  "Hmmm..." I wondered, "why is Canadian Thanksgiving in October?" 

Since the US Thanksgiving is always the next-to-last Thursday in November, I also found myself sitting at the piano, practicing my Christmas carols and Hannukah songs for an early holiday party that's coming up in just two weeks.  "Why," I also wondered, "aren't there any Thanksgiving songs?  Am I just missing something?"  

This led me to do a bit of special Thanksgiving SearchResearch on the topic.  Some of which I found surprised me.  So I thought I'd share my holiday Research Questions with you in this special Cross-cultural Thanksgiving edition of SRS.  See if you can't figure these out... 

1.  I know Canada and the US celebrate Thanksgiving each fall.  But do any other countries celebrate Thanksgiving (or equivalent holidays) as well?  If so, what are they called, and when are they celebrated? 

2.  What Thanksgiving (and equivalent) traditions do different countries have?  (I bet they don't all eat turkey with cranberry sauce... that's particularly North American.)   

3.  Speaking of ritual foods (turkey, cranberries, etc.)... what ritual songs are associated with the holidays?  Many other holidays have associated songs--why not Thanksgiving?  What am I missing? 

Let us know what you find out.  I'll be back with my answers (and how I found them) next week. 

(And yes, I remember that we did a similar SRS Challenge back in 2011, but this time, I'm looking for several other cultures that have a Thanksgiving celebration--not just one in particular.)  

In the meantime, Merry Thanksgiving!  



Google's Thanksgiving Doodle for 2018 (US): 

Thanksgiving Doodle for 2018 (Canada):  

Search on! 

P.S.  What's the difference between thankful and grateful?  Could we have had Gratesgiving Day instead?  Why is it that I can thank someone, but I find it difficult to grate someone? 

SearchResearch Challenge (11/14/18): How many wildfires in California over the past 20 years?

As you probably have heard… 

… California is suffering from an especially dramatic, draining, and difficult wildfire season. 

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not this is more fire than usual, or if it’s part of a longer trend.  As you might expect, there has been a lot of debate about whether this fire season is due to global warming, or if it’s just “forest mismanagement.”  

Regular Reader Ramón asked this question of me, and I thought it would be a superb Challenge for the  week.  

Here’s this week’s Challenge, based on Ramón’s original question… 

1. How has the number of wildfires changed over the years in California?  Where there more (or fewer) in the past than is taking place now?  

I suspect that the only way to answer this is to find an authoritative data base of California wildfires.  (Note:  I haven’t solved this Challenge yet, so I’m open to being surprised.)  Once we find that database, we might be able to easily create a plot of the number over the years and discover if there's any particular trend.  

For the sake of consistency and simplicity, let’s assume that any fire that’s larger than 10 acres in size is a “wildfire.”  

Can you answer the Challenge for this week?  

Let us know how you go about solving this one.  

Search on! 

P.S. For people worried about how close I am to the wildfires, they’re nowhere close.  On the other hand, we ARE getting a lot of smoke from the Camp Fire near Chico (up in the northeast part of the state).  The breathing has been hazardous at times, so I can only imagine how bad it is up there, near the fires.  

This is a composite image from NASA showing the size of the Camp Fire (Paradise, CA).  The white rectangle on the right is about 20 miles high (32 km) and 10 miles wide (16 km).  

Just to show it up close: 

This NASA image is from the Operational Land Imager aboard the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite. California's Camp Fire on Nov. 8, 2018, around 10:45 a.m. local time (1845 GMT).

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from USGS

Answer: Is this a safe treatment for caries?

One of my goals in writing this blog... 

... is to develop some skills that are useful in general.  You know, real skills for real problems.  

In medicine, new treatments and therapies come to market every so often, and many people wonder--is this good for me?  Does this actually work?  What are the risks and benefits? 

In general, how do you evaluate these things?  

This week we consider the dental treatment SDF (Silver Diamine Fluoride).  It's a simple, low-cost way to treat teeth with a coating that not only prevents future cavities (caries), but also seems able to reverse the damage in some existing cavities. 

Suppose that you're considering getting this treatment for someone in your family.  How would you go about doing some checking to see if it's effective, and if it's safe.  (As you know, not all medical treatments turn out to be safe in the end; think radioactive water as a spa treatment... a really bad idea.) 

Ideally, we--the SearchResearchers of the world--would be able to do some kind of sanity check before taking on a new treatment regime. 

This leads to today's Challenge: 

1.  How would you go about determining if SDF is right for you, your family, or your child?  What would you do to research this?  Would you get SDF? 

We SRS folks have a fairly high bar for this kind of research.  We'd like to find multiple lines of support from sources we trust.  So I began with a simple query to learn more about SDF treatment: 

     [ how does SDF treatment work ] 

And found a quick answer at the California Dental Association: 

"Silver diamine fluoride (SDF) is a topical medication used to slow down or stop dental decay in both primary and permanent teeth. ... When applied to a tooth with a cavity, SDF hardens the softened tooth structure, turning the damaged portion of the tooth black in color."  

That's from the California Dental Association (the CDA, which I happen to know is a reputable information provider).  But true to my skeptical nature, I double checked:  the CDA has been around since 1870 and has a great record of being both a philanthropic organization and a provider of information about dentistry in general. 

Now I have an idea what it is and how it works.  It's interesting that they go on to say that: 

"SDF is a conservative approach to managing dental decay and can be used on teeth where there is no pain or discomfort. It is particularly useful for providing dental care to individuals who present challenges to receiving traditional treatment because of their age, behavioral issues, or medical conditions." 

At this point, I wanted  a broad range of perspectives on SDF treatment, so I did a simpler query: 

     [ SDF treatment ] 

and started opening up multiple tabs side-by-side.  Here are some of the pages I opened up (and a few things I learned from each):  

1. Silver Diamine Fluoride: A New, Old Approach to Dental Caries Management.  This is a presentation by Scott L. Tomar (DMD, DrPH) from the 2016 American Association of Community Dental Programs conference.  It's a pretty nice summary (with lots of photos) about how SDF is used, when it should be used, and when it shouldn't.  It gives a bunch of references to other articles about SDF, including what the toxicity is (extraordinarily low) and generally seems very practical.  This is someone who uses SDF in his practice and comments on how it's accepted.  (And gives some very practical advice about its use:  "SDF stains the crap out of everything.")  The author also points out that silver fluoride has been used in Japan for 80 years without any issues.  (Interestingly, they used it to turn teeth black as a cosmetic treatment for teeth!)  

2.  Found several fact sheets about SDF by various community dental programs.  (Little Pearls dentistry for kids; America Academy for Pediatric Dentistry and others.  They all agree--SDF is great for kids because there's no pain, just a gentle painting of the teeth with a microbrush.  Some parts of the teeth do turn black, but only the parts that already have cavities.  As they point out, "that's how you know it's working!"  They correctly point out that inner cavities and difficult to reach cavities are probably not a concern, and visible caries need some other kind of treatment.  

With the query: 

     [ SDF for adults ] 

I found another trove of papers from reputable sources.  For instance, 

3.  A paper from the American Dental Association on Guidelines for SDF treatment of pediatric and special needs patients.  They're more cautious, but point out that SDF works exceptionally well for pediatric and special needs patients (who might have difficulty brushing their own teeth), but that the results are so intriguing that they're going to do additional research. 

4. But in another paper, A systematic review of silver diamine fluoride: Effectiveness and application in older adults.  This is another study of another kind of cavity, this time in older adults.  The results are amazingly good--the effectiveness is incredibly high, and no adverse side-effects were noted. 

To be ultra-cautious, I did searches for: 

     [ SDF adverse reactions ] 

     [ SDF side-effects ] 

and found nothing of consequence.  Everyone noted the staining (and in particular, that if you get it on the patients tongue, they'll have a black mark that will last for a week or so... but it's painless and goes away quickly).  

Overall I read about 5 papers from very different sources (some very technical, from highly regarded journals) and another 10 or so summaries for patients by different dentists who use SDF.  

I admit I was slightly skeptical about this universal acclaim, but then I looked up the cost of the standard SDF medicine that the dentists use.  It's $100/bottle.  Each bottle has around 250 drops, or around 40¢/drop.  Each drop treats around 5 teeth.  You can do the math... that's 8 cents / tooth: Nobody is making any money on this. It just looks like a very effective, very cheap therapy for dental cavities.  

Oddly enough, I actually had to visit my dentist this week and when I asked her about SDF she too was concerned about potential blackening, but "otherwise it sounds great for kids!"  (She also asked if I was studying dentistry... Apparently few people ask about SDF.    

 

A funny aside:  Since it was Halloween, we considered vampire teeth.. like these...

If I were a vampire, I'd worry about the number of cavities caused by an all-blood diet.  I know that the Maasai of the African veldt have a large amount of cow blood and milk in their diet, and surprisingly, they have very low rates of dental cavities. But if very modern vampires (who might consume larger amounts of sugar in their diets) are concerned about caries on their fangs, then SDF might be just the ticket.  And if they happen to turn black, then so much the better, eh? 

Search Lessons 

In this case, the research is pretty overwhelmingly positive.  As one of the research papers I read (UCSF Protocol for Caries Arrest Using Silver Diamine Fluoride: Rationale, Indications, and Consent, J Calif Dent Assoc. 2016 Jan; 44(1): 16–28) pointed out: 

 "Silver diamine fluoride is an inexpensive topical medicament used extensively in other countries to treat dental caries across the age spectrum. No other intervention approaches the ease of application and efficacy. Multiple randomized clinical trials – with hundreds of patients each – support use for caries treatment, thus substantiating an intervention that addresses an unmet need in American dentistry. In August 2014 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the first silver diamine fluoride product for market, and as of April 2015 that product is available."

Although I spent a fair bit of time looking for side-effects and adverse side effects (my searches also included the fancy medical term "contraindications," I just didn't find anything.  

So.. would I use this for me and my family?  Yes, although probably not on the front teeth!  

This was a surprisingly simple SRS Challenge.  It was probably a 30 minute task to become comfortable with the current state of research on SDF.  That's a remarkable thing to say.  (I remember when this same kind of background research would have taken days!)  

Search on!