If it seems like the Detroit
Lions have played on Thanksgiving since it became a national holiday,
it’s because they actually started seven years earlier.   

True, the Pilgrims celebrated
the first Thanksgiving in October of 1621, but the custom faded, resurfacing
only when George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt promoted
the idea as a national tonic in troubled times.  FDR tried to move
the unofficial holiday back a week to expand the shopping season, but
Congress put an end to all the feast-fiddling in 1941, when it fixed
Thanksgiving’s date forever and declared it a national holiday.  

George Richards was way ahead
of them.  In 1934 Richards bought the Portsmouth, Ohio, Spartans,
for $7,952.08, moved them to Detroit, and re-named them the Lions. 
Incredibly, they won their first ten contests to tie the Chicago Bears
for first place with three games left.  The bad news: only about
12,000 people seemed to care.  If the Lions couldn’t catch on
at 10-0, Richards knew, their days in Detroit were numbered.   

Richards needed a hook — and
fast — so he invited the Bears to play on FDR’s unofficial Thanksgiving
Day, and drew an overflow crowd of 26,000.  The Bears may have
won the game, 19-16, but the Lions won the war.   

They had started a tradition
that’s now older than 22 of the NFL’s 32 current teams.  They
rewarded their fans the next season by beating the Bears 14-2, on Thanksgiving,
en route to their first league championship, the same year the Tigers,
Red Wings and Detroit native Joe Louis all won titles, earning Detroit
the nickname, “City of Champions.”  (If this sounds unbelievable,
we understand.)   

(The Dallas Cowboys started the
second-half of this holiday biathlon in 1966, when they stuck the powerful
Cleveland Browns with a 26-14 Thanksgiving turkey.  The Cowboys
have played every year since, having successfully fought to keep their
tradition protected by the NFL, too.)   

The annual tradition invariably
inspires the Lions’ best effort. “I don’t know what it is about
the Thanksgiving game,” says former All-Pro lineman Keith Dorney. 
“Maybe it’s the holiday or the national television, but there’s
magic in the air for the Lions.” 

Call it magic, motivation, or
Full-Moon Football, on Thanksgiving the Lions have traditionally been
over-achievers, and never more so than in 1962, against Vince Lombardi’s
undefeated Green Bay Packers.  The Lions jumped out to a shocking
26-0 lead, to give the Packers their only loss that year – one “so
distasteful in Green Bay,” writes Lombardi biographer David Maraniss,
“that not even the championship win over the [New York] Giants completely
erased it.” 

There hasn’t been much magic
for the Lions the last six seasons, when they’ve have lost ever Thanksgiving
Day game.  But these days, they’re usually on national TV just
once a year – and that’s something the whole country can be thankful
for.