THE REASON LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE NEVER HAD A TRADITIONAL THANKSGIVING EPISODE

The Real Reason Little House Never Had a Traditional Thanksgiving Episode By Michael John Petty November 18, 2024 Thanksgiving is coming up at the end of November. Around this time of year, TV networks across the nation are known for running marathons of some of your favorite classic television shows, and sometimes that includes Little House on the Prairie. But although there are quite a few Christmas episodes of Little House, you won't find a traditional Thanksgiving episode anywhere you look. Why is that? Well, come with us as we find out. 'Little House on the Prairie' Never Had a Traditional Thanksgiving Episode Across all of Little House's nine seasons, you will never find an episode that's specifically about Thanksgiving. That's not to say that the American holiday isn't mentioned on occasion, or that some episodes don't come close. One such episode is the Season 3 two-parter "Journey in the Spring," where Carrie (Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush) befriends a turkey she names Tom. Though Carrie and Charles (Michael Landon) had picked out the turkey to "have" for supper, Carrie took that as they were inviting the bird to dinner rather than eating it. As such, she begins treating Tom like a pet. Eventually, they take Tom back to the farm they got him from, and no Thanksgiving dinner is had. But that's about as close to a Thanksgiving feast as Little House ever got on the main show. In her book, My Prairie Cookbook: Memories and Frontier Food from My Little House to Yours, series star Melissa Gilbert (who played young Laura Ingalls Wilder) noted that, although Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday, there was a reason the show never did a direct "Turkey Day"-centric hour. "We never did a Thanksgiving episode of Little House because it had been declared a national holiday only a few years before the show takes place," Gilbert explained. This checks out. According to the United States National Archives, President George Washington once marked Thursday, November 26, 1789, as the first "Day of Publick Thanksgivin," but it wasn't until 1863 (about a decade before Little House starts) that President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. Even then, it wasn't until 1941 that the official "fourth Thursday of November" date was set. 'The Little House Years' Was a Heartfelt Thanksgiving-Themed Tribute to the Show But that doesn't mean that the series didn't just ignore our nation's national day of thanks. Thanksgiving was still around for the majority of Little House, even if the series never did an episode about the holiday (which perhaps isn't surprising, since they stopped doing annual Christmas episodes after the third season). Instead, Little House went a step further in celebrating Thanksgiving with their three-hour special (with commercials) titled The Little House Years. This special (one of many the show aired back in its day), aired on NBC on November 15, 1979, in the middle of the show's sixth season. It was essentially a clip show as the Ingalls family gathers together for a Thanksgiving dinner, reflecting on all the things and people they're thankful for. While The Little House Years is unashamedly a clip show, it was done tastefully well. The Thanksgiving setting, with each member of the family thanking God for their blessings and history together, is actually the perfect time to reflect on Little House as a whole. After all, the characters themselves are reminiscing about what they're thankful for, and so inserting the material in to fill in their mental gaps just feels right. Of all the ways to do a clip show, book-ending it with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner is perhaps one of the more novel concepts. Longtime fans of the show will undoubtedly feel at home in this holiday special, even if it just serves as a retrospective on the series' greatest hits. Since we'll likely never see the show return or be rebooted, it's a great reminder of how thankful we really are for Little House on the Prairie after 50 years. 

Little House on the Prairie is available for streaming on Prime Video in the U.S. 

AH: Gilbert's answer doesn't seem valid as historical accuracy never mattered on that show.