Happy Thanksgiving! Spend some time with your family this week and enjoy some turkey. Here’s this week in Pandemonium Nov. 25-Dec. 1

November 25, 1783—Evacuation Day in New York City marks the end of the revolutionary war. In Pandemonium, no fewer than thirteen Stranger families with loyalist sympathies pack up and leave, most of whom immigrate to Canada. The Witch mayor, Elphebas Ravenwood, stands at the bridge leading to the mainland and waves them out.

November 26, 1941—President Roosevelt signs a bill that formalizes Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November, leading to the first Thanksgiving the Strangers and Witches actually agree on. The Witches has previously celebrated “Resentmas” after President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation, and the Strangers refused to acknowledge President Washington’s 1789 proclamation. The two sides bury the hatchet with a common meal in the town square, which quickly devolves into a fist fight.

November 27, 2004—Harvey Flom, Pandemonium’s first gay councilmember, is shot dead outside his home. The assassin, a Witch named Harry Blackroot, claimed to not know Flom was gay, but shot him over a three-cent sales tax increase.

November 28, 1896—In an attempt to drum up sales for motor cars, famed inventor Frank Duryea holds a motorcar race on Pandemonium’s city streets. Despite the lack of other cars, Duryea runs off the road and falls into the sea. While Duryea survives the ordeal, he understandably fails to sell a single car.

November 29, 1864—Members of the pro-Union Stranger militia attempt to sabotage the Confederate city government using nitroglycerin to blow up the historic town meeting hall. Nitroglycerin is very unstable, which the Stranger militiamen soon discover upon handling it, blowing themselves up before reaching the meeting hall.

November 30, 1953—The first modern example of a meteorite striking a human being occurs in Pandemonium when such a space rock crashes through a Fieldhand woman’s roof and strikes her in the hip. The woman, Gladys Jackson, suffers a nasty bruise but no other injuries. Satanic High Priest Blaise Jackson preemptively states the Witch community had nothing to do with this.

December 1, 1874—In the midst of reconstruction, Field Servant Marcus Johnson founds Jameson University for freed slaves. However, Jameson University sadly closes nine years later due to lack of financial support and harassment by local authorities. Fieldhands pursuing higher education would attend other historically black universities in South Carolina such as Allen and Benedict.