Thanksgiving Day stuffing is a tradition in journalism, celebrated on front doorsteps across the nation as subscribers pick up their newspaper. With all the advertisements and inserts, the stuffed Thanksgiving Day paper could be the size of a small turkey.

It’s the biggest newspaper of the year, has been so for 80 or more years. There’s a lot of sociology, history, economics and politics in that paper — all part of the stuffing.

The rise of the Sunday newspaper and of holiday editions wasn’t possible until dime stores and other commercial enterprises produced the advertising to make mammoth editions profitable. Retail interests prevailed upon President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 to set Thanksgiving as the next-to-last Thursday of November to guarantee at least a one-month Christmas shopping season. (Two years later Congress made it the fourth Thursday of November.)

Yes, a lot goes into the recipe for the Thanksgiving Day paper.

In Iowa, the Des Moines Register has added still another ingredient — a $1.25 surcharge that will be tacked onto the payments subscribers make from their credit cards, bank accounts and other billings. (Editor’s note: in an earlier version I wrote incorrectly that the surcharge would be $1.86.)

The Register is one of a few newspapers to levy such a fee. The Fresno Bee in Central California in a published advisory to readers announced it will have a $1 surcharge to “help offset additional operating expenses for the production of this edition.”

A spokesman at the Newspaper Association of America said he was aware of a third newspaper with such a surcharge and surmised there were maybe a few others. While he did not name the paper, he said, the surcharge “has been received by the subscribers without ruffling a feather.”

Same seems to go in Des Moines. The existence of the surcharge surfaced in a column in the town’s alternative weekly, Cityview. While the surcharge reportedly was also in place last year, I couldn’t find it when reviewing our bank statements and Register EZPay charges. (When you sign up for such payment you agree to pay increases in subscription rates.) The publisher at the Register did not respond to e-mail questions about the charge, and a fleeting phone inquiry also drew a blank.

No matter, because, at the heart of it, these points are clear.

• Putting out the Thanksgiving Day paper costs more than usual, and even on a normal day subscribers don’t come close to covering the expenses of production and delivery.

• Most people are willing to pay more for the ad-rich, insert-stuffed paper. And delivery people likely feel they should be compensated when heavy lifting is required.

• Nevertheless, local reactions include outrage that the Register wants readers to subsidize the paper’s cost of generating the revenue and profits that are part of its Thanksgiving feast.

Let’s take those in order:

Costs: The $16.13 a month in EZPay for the Register does not cover the cost of the newsprint to produce those papers and the costs of delivery. Forget about the costs of getting the news and printing it. The Fresno Bee is roughly the size of the Register, with daily circulations of about 126,00 and 117,000 respectively, and Sunday at 154,000 and 205,000, with the Register leading. Both papers are based in urban areas in agricultural regions. Ray Steele, Jr., a retired Bee publisher, was a young reporter on the paper when I was in the 1960s; so he readily shared information with me. He figured newsprint costs for, say, 200,000 copies at 20 cents a paper, with another 20 cents for utilities, handling and processing. Add 15 to 35 cents a copy for delivery. On Thanksgiving, he said, they paid carriers 10 cents more an issue for the stuffing. That totals 65 to 85 cents an issue, without costs of reporting, printing, salaries, etc.

The Bee spends about $10 million a year on newsprint. Jeff Gledhill, the vice president for operations said, “Assuming a Thanksgiving scenario of 72 pages and a press run of 175,000 papers, we’ll consume 43.5 tons of newsprint… A good round number for the current market price is $600 (a ton).” Using the $600 figure, amounts to $26,100 for newsprint.

Gledhill added, “From a production standpoint, there are other issues that add to a high cost for that day. The inserts are an incredibly large challenge on the production and distribution areas… (A)ll of this work is done on top of the normally scheduled production so at times there are no options but to pay overtime.”

People will pay more: On the other hand, forget about costs, because the demand is high and people willingly pay more for the paper. John Murray of the NAA says, “Advertising sells newspapers. “Our…single-copy-buyer studies document that advertising is the number one reason…for buying a Sunday newspaper,” particularly for younger women.

Murray points out that many papers charge the Sunday rate for single copy sales on Thanksgiving Day: “We did a survey of 405 newspapers in January and 35 percent were charging a premium for Thanksgiving Day, none reported lost sales.”

Bob Hudson, who retired in 1985, was a longtime Register and Tribune and Cowles Company executive — holding every senior title in circulation, advertising and marketing at one time or another. He points out that even in the 1930s people voluntarily paid more for the Thanksgiving paper — albeit indirectly in tips that week to their carriers. Thanksgiving, not Christmas, was the bonus time. But Hudson will also point out that the so-called “little merchants” have been replaced by adults. Adults expect to be paid more when they have to work harder and might organize into a union if their expectations aren’t met.

Outrage: Granted costs and demand are high and the subscription costs relatively low. But as Steele observed, “That said, there is a lot of extra revenue from all those preprints” and Christmas ads. At budget time, the upcoming Thanksgiving bonanza is not a surprise. Should a surcharge be levied because the newspaper experiences more costs in making a lot more money? To critics, the $1.25 fee is levied because it can be, and because it makes more money for the corporation, perhaps more than $150,000.

For now, the Register is one of the few papers in the nation to levy such a surcharge. Given the economics of the newspaper industry, the Register won’t be so lonely next year. It’s just ahead of the field.