On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving in 2009, I was at Entercom in Denver. The Marketing Director, in preparing to hit the road before rush hour, dropped me off at the airport. With three hours before my flight, the usually busy airport was in a lull before the storm.
I grabbed a beer, pulled out a book, and found a seat at an empty gate. At about 3p, a trickle of people started down the concourse. At 4p, this increased into a pretty steady flow. At 5p the dam burst, and a flood of people came rushing through, headed for flights. It reminded me of the final scene from Force Ten From Navarone.
Thanksgiving had begun.
Sometimes we are too Calendar Literal. Summer begins on June 20th but in Minnesota, it begins in early-mid May. So you need to acknowledge this giant migration of humanity.
Now, in 2025, there’s an added layer of anxiety. Flight insecurity around the shutdown has people on edge. Are the flights going to be delayed? Will TSA be understaffed? This nervous energy is palpable, and it’s affecting everyone trying to get home for the holidays. Your listeners are feeling it. Acknowledge it. Use it.
Have updates about airport parking. What stores still have turkeys? Do Turkey Finder and have per-pound pricing for area stores. Don’t forget that Thanksgiving Eve is one of the busiest club nights of the year.
In the Dumpage below, you’ll find fifteen ideas broken into three categories: the week before and day before Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving Day itself, and the day/week after. Some of these are tried and true. Some are completely insane. All of them have worked somewhere, and most of them were HUGE. Pick what fits your market, your staff, and your appetite for chaos.
Pre-T-Day
- First Turkey of Thanksgiving – Get a dozen turkey eggs from a turkey farm. Number them. Give away the numbers on the air. NASCAR them with client logos and on Thanksgiving morning, webcam them in an incubator. First turkey of Thanksgiving to be born/hatched wins a tree and the accompanying accoutrement for its listener.
- Mom? Dad? This Is Tiffany. She Couldn’t Make It, But Sends Her Love – Bring a male model and a female model to a club promotion, where you would set up a tree. Have listeners get their photo with the appropriate model, so they can bring it home and show their parents the person they’ve been dating… but regrettably couldn’t come along. Another option is to loan out a hot intern or female announcer to act as a “beard” for a gay listener who needs someone to go with him to his holiday family dinner.
- Adopt (DJ) This Holiday – Have a new jock from out of the market adopted by a listener’s family who will take him in, feed, and bathe him until the show returns. The key? The post promotion. The horror stories. The photos of him/her passed out on their couch with beer spilled on them.
- The Night Before Thanksgiving – Have a van out at the airport, greeting people as they return home to spend the holiday with their parents and family. Get the Skycaps and other airport personnel on the air to talk about this day from hell. The other place to be is at the grocery store. Have a jock out there to report on the turkey selection and interview some of the procrastinators who waited until the last possible moment to buy their holiday meals. Maybe you could give them all certificates for Swanson’s “Hungry Man” turkey dinners.
- Ala “Office Space” – Bring in a listener on Wednesday, and before they leave, hypnotize them to calm them down. Snap them out of it on Monday.
T-Day
- Our Jocks Are Real Turkeys – Replace your entire airstaff with the SFX of gobbling turkeys all day Thanksgiving. Stage all the callers you air and have them interact and converse with the turkeys as if nothing is wrong. Mix 94.9 in Cincy does this every year. HUGE!!!
- Debuting A New Format – Flip to all Thanksgiving music. “You’ve just completed the biggest music research study in state history, and the numbers are in. People DEMAND Thanksgiving music.” Play the Adam Sandler song over and over, apologize, and return to your regular format. Has been done three times now, and it’s invariably, stupidly, large.
- Wheel Of Macy’s Clichés – Take ten callers, spin the wheel, each gets assigned a word (Sparkling, Spectacular, Magical, Festive, Wonderful, Basking, High-Stepping, Crazy/Wacky/Zany/Loveable). Have an intern watch the show, and every time the trio from The TODAY Show uses one of the terms, make a notation. The person whose cliche gets the most votes wins a tree, or a primo spot at your market’s holiday parade, or some twinkle lights, or…the ultimate Christmas cliche: a fruitcake and a Chia Pet.
- Thanksgiving Proxies – Have each of the talent do a short clip representing a relative whom you would have had to sit next to at dinner. So if you’re bored, click on “Aunt Gabby,” who proceeds to laugh about the time you accidentally made doody at Thanksgiving when you were three and how cute that was. You’d also want: the one-drink-and-belligerent cousin, the uncle who says just really inappropriate stuff without a clue, Mom who asks when you’re going to settle down, and Penny-pinching dad (“I got this bird at the Kwik Trip last night! 4 cents a pound. Eat around the brown spots.”), sullen sibling, sibling whose kids are smarter than yours.
- Dinner For The Family-less – If you’ve got an announcer who is from out of town, make a big deal of it and have him/her host a free Thanksgiving dinner at a local restaurant for listeners who aren’t able to get home and don’t want to spend Thanksgiving dinner alone with a Domino’s Pizza and re-runs of “Facts Of Life” on the USA Network.
T-Day+1: The Weekend After
- I’ll Take “What Is 200 Pounds?” For $500, Alex – All weekend after Thanksgiving, listeners called, won tickets, and guessed what would be the total combined weight packed on by the morning show from weigh-in that Wednesday to weigh-out Monday morning. The person who got closest won a limo to the screening and all they could eat at the Old Country Buffet before the movie.
- Turkey And Stuff It – Weekend-after-Thanksgiving contest that had jocks pulling the hourly prizes out of a turkey’s body cavity. Gross, squishy SFX added a key element.
- Felon At The Table – The day after Thanksgiving, award a prize to the listener who had the biggest ex-con join them for their holiday dinner. The winner was a woman whose uncle had just been released for manslaughter.
- Identity Theft Tuesday – Follow-up Cyber Monday with this: turns out the boss’s assistant gets liquored up pretty easily, and she showed up at the Friday night club gig and let it spill that he uses the same password for his financial stuff that he uses on eHarmony: “flirtyboy69”. Everything you give away tomorrow should be purchased using his credit cards.
- Heat & Greet – If you have access to any kind of industrial warming device for the schmos on the sidewalk, that would be large. Stick out and entertain the masses, freezing their keesters with music, games, and free hot chocolate. Q-107.5 in Memphis was live from in front of a Target when two women started fighting over a spot in line, and one tasered the other. Great Radio.
