Unlimited edition. 18 x 24 inch, museum-quality poster on matte paper.

This poster was released Thanksgiving week 2022. When I started thinking about typical Thanksgiving palettes, a wild turkey didn’t spring to mind. Indeed, it wasn’t even a North American species! The diminutive and charismatic European robin struck me as the perfect choice – and not just because of its seasonal, pumpkin-pie-in-a-pan plumage. The Thanksgiving holiday means different things to different people, but its origin in the early-17th-century harvest celebrations of Puritan settlers is uncontroversial. Along with their traditions and perspectives, the settlers carried with them English names and associations and, during those difficult times, they sought through lines. When they saw a bird with a bold orange breast on these shores, they dubbed it a “robin” because that’s what they called a bird with an orange breast in England. Thus, the American robin came by the name we still use today. In fact, the European robin and American robin are not closely related, the former being an Old World flycatcher species and the latter, a thrush, but we understood very little about taxonomy in the 17th century…and, hey, who am I to scoff at folks grouping birds by color?! 😜

Although our American Thanksgiving tradition has its roots in the harvest festivals of the British Isles, there is no equivalent holiday in the UK today. But for reasons both religious and secular, the pumpkin pie bird – erm, European robin – is closely associated with Christmas there. There’s an old tale about a brown bird present for Christ’s birth that gets accidentally burned on the breast by an ember; this burn forever marks its descendants red because of, as Mary allegedly noted, “its kind heart.” Additionally, beginning in Victorian times, the red uniforms worn by UK postal workers gave rise to their “robins” nickname, and because postal worker “robins” are especially busy during the holiday season, the birds became a staple image on holiday stamps, postcards, and decorations, and remain so today.

Note: These archival poster prints feature rich, appealing colors. I encourage customers to take care in handling them until they are framed/protected for display; the darker colors on the matte paper can be scratched. They ship rolled, so customers need to flatten them before framing (or have their framer do so).

Charitable Sales Model: Whenever one of these poster prints is purchased, a charitable contribution equal to 10% of the print’s cost (or $3.60) is made to a nonprofit working to tackle environmental or social challenges. Read more about my charitable sales model here.