Little House on the Prairie was known for its many Halloween and Christmas episodes over its nine seasons, but one holiday the Ingalls family didn’t celebrate during the show’s regular run was Thanksgiving.
Forty years after the show’s 1974-1983 run, series star Melissa Gilbert explained the omission in her book, My Prairie Cookbook: Memories and Frontier Food From My House to Yours. "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,” she wrote as a preface to a Roast Turkey with Herb Butter recipe. “But Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of all, mainly because my favorite meal is served on that day.”
According to the United States National Archives, Thanksgiving wasn’t declared a national holiday until President Abraham Lincoln made the proclamation in 1863. Little House was set in the 1870s when it originally premiered on NBC.
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Little House on the Prairie came close to talking turkey a few times. In the Season 3 episode “Journey in the Spring,” Carrie Ingalls (Lindsay/Sydney Greenbush) befriended a “pet” turkey the family planned to eat for dinner, but it was a side story in a larger two-parter.
Much more on the turkey day theme was the one-off 1979 TV movie called The Little House Years.The special aired on NBC on Thursday, November 15, 1979, apart from the show’s regular Monday night time slot. The retrospective, directed by Michael Landon, featured the Ingalls clan reminiscing about their “journeys and struggles during a family Thanksgiving gathering” and was chock full of clips from past episodes. But The Little House Years was a clear TV special and was not considered a regular Little House episode, per TV Tropes.
While she didn’t get to eat her favorite meal on a regular Little House on the Prairie episode, Gilbert was the star of a turkey commercial—and it came right at the start of her Little House fame in the early 1970s.
In a 1974 Butterball turkey commercial, Gilbert and a young actor playing her little brother were seen preparing for the family holiday.
“You want me to teach you about the holidays?” Gilbert asks the boy. “Well, all these people come over, and you have to kiss them. Aunt Martha brings this yucky yellow salad with marshmallows all over it and Aunt Ruth always cries…I don't know, she just does. But for dinner we always have a Butterball!”
The boy then chimes in, “But mom said we’re going to have turkey.”
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