Thanksgiving - J.C. Leyendecker Art Print

Two haloed saints of the American November stand on a lemon ochre plaque. A Puritan in a buckled capotain hat cuts his eyes sideways at the boy, and three hundred years crackle across the gap.

J.C. Leyendecker painted this Thanksgiving cover for The Saturday Evening Post in November 1928. Thin cobalt halos hover like bent wire behind the stern Pilgrim and a blond college football player. His chiseled jaw tanned and topped with wind-tousled gold curls.

The elder hugs a brass-clasped Bible against his ribs. A matchlock musket rests on his shoulder, its stock gripped in a hand the color of cured ham. Steel cuirass gleams below his falling-band collar. A coral sash knots over ochre doublet skirts, and a coal-black cloak pools around his arm like wet pitch.

Across the ground line, the footballer's rust red jersey hangs torn off a leather shoulder pad. Canvas pants wear stitched thigh guards the shade of old saddles. A pigskin football waits by his cleats. 

Saturday Evening Post readers carved turkey at noon and packed the bleachers by three for Thanksgiving Day football. Pine needles bristle at their heels, sharp as a colony's first winter, and a tiny cinnabar JCL monogram flares beside the Pilgrim's buckled shoe.