A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Bet you didn't know that Thanksgiving used to be celebrated just like Halloween. It was called Ragamuffin Day. It was celebrated across the country, although it was mostly a New York thing.
CARMEN NIGRO: The tradition begins shortly after Thanksgiving is created as a national holiday, so around the 1870s.
MARTÍNEZ: Carmen Nigro is an assistant director at the New York Public Library. She said children would dress up as cartoonish beggars.
NIGRO: So they've got huge, oversized clothes on. They've dirtied their skin with shoe polish and soot.
MARTÍNEZ: And to make things worse, they'd wear costumes and masks often depicting racial stereotypes.
NIGRO: Before Halloween was a thing, the biggest time of the year for buying masks was Thanksgiving.
MARTÍNEZ: Kids would go house to house, knocking on doors, begging and asking, anything for Thanksgiving? And sometimes, they would actually get something.
NIGRO: Usually pennies, an apple or a piece of candy.
MARTÍNEZ: Ragamuffin Day reached peak popularity in the early 20th century. And then in the 1930s, it faced backlash.
NIGRO: By, like, people in the school system. The school superintendent is quoted in an article as being like, this is not the way children should act, begging door to door.
MARTÍNEZ: So organizations started putting together Thanksgiving parades for children to participate in called Ragamuffin parades.
NIGRO: So they can still wear their costumes and do a thing, but they're like, don't - no more going around to houses and begging for coins and treats.
MARTÍNEZ: The tradition got pushed aside by two things. First, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade became the preferred parade.
NIGRO: The other thing is Halloween really starts to take off in the '40s and '50s, and Thanksgiving Ragamuffins kind of decline parallel to that.
MARTÍNEZ: These days, you can still find a handful of Ragamuffin parades, mostly in New York and New Jersey. If there's not one in your area, you can still take advantage of Ragamuffin Day when your neighbors give you the side-eye because you have not taken down your Halloween decorations yet. Just say you're celebrating an old-timey Thanksgiving. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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