Holidays and a Faulty Memory

Indian Summer is over. (Are we allowed to say that? Indian Summer? Should it be Native American Summer? All this politically correct stuff confuses me.) We’ve enjoyed unusually warm and sunny days of late but now reality has set in. It’s mid-November; it’s raining; it’s sleeting; it’s snowing. It’s the kick-off of the holiday season!

Was the weather different in late November when the pilgrims had their first Thanksgiving? Were they plagued with rain and snow mixes? Was Thanksgiving even IN November? I’m thinking late October would have been a better choice. The harvest would have all been in by then – time to celebrate. Canada celebrates Thanksgiving the second Monday of October. Now THAT makes sense. A Monday holiday and reasonable weather. The United States didn’t settle on the fourth Thursday of November until 1941, and then it was so designated in order to give the economy a boost by starting the Christmas shopping frenzy early. Typical.

I lovingly refer to Thanksgiving as the “Feast of Gluttony.” It’s the one meal a year I truly enjoy cooking. This year we’ll be celebrating a week early with my daughter and son-in-law from Minnesota, and because they are committed Weight Watchers members, I’ll be trying some new recipes that are lower in calories. I’m really excited about this. I would love to eat good food that isn’t packed with sugar and butter. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

A friend of mine told a story of walking up a mountainside in Vermont with his grandchildren one Thanksgiving. They were complaining they wanted to be carried because they were so small and tired but rather than carry them, he found two sticks, one for each of them to hold onto, as he pulled them along behind him. He turned to them and said, “Do you realize that the Pilgrims didn’t have roads or paths to walk like we do?” One of the little ones replied, “No wonder they all died.”

I remember Thanksgivings in the 1950s where the snow was so deep it took hours to dig out the car so we could all pile in and drive three quarters of a mile to Grandma’s house. I tried to remember one year how many people were at those Thanksgiving dinners and I came up with between 20 and 25. My grandparents had ten children, and most, if not all, of them came home for Thanksgiving, along with their spouses and children. We all sat at the same table, in the same room, with no television.

I can remember walking into the kitchen and watching all the hustle and bustle of my grandmother and her daughters cooking. No commercial size oven there. It seems it was smaller than a modern day oven, but in it was the 24 pound turkey, with sides of ham, sweet potatoes, stuffing and baked beans all piled around it, most balancing precariously along the sides of the turkey pan. A huge pot of potatoes boiled on the stove while all the pies that had been baked the day before lined the counter top.

I know we were all squished together at that table with very little elbow room, and I know there must have been squabbles now and again, but my memory has erased all the negatives. What I remember now is a Terry Redlin type scene of togetherness. God bless failing memories…