When a chill’s in the air and the leaves have turned color (or have already fallen on our lawns), our minds tend to turn to Thanksgiving Day planning.
As a baby boomer growing up in Ohio, I learned in school that Thanksgiving is a commemoration of giving thanks to God by the Pilgrims of Plymouth, MA, for the seasonal harvest – the food that would enable them to survive through winter. We kids were also taught that the Pilgrims wanted to share their thanks with the Native Americans who had helped them that year. We really didn’t learn much about the first Thanksgiving in terms of what they actually did, what was available to eat or the fact that it wasn’t an annual event in Plymouth after 1621. As kids, what we did on Thanksgiving was eat! After finding our places at “the kids’ table” and fidgeting through the blessing, our only focus was stuffing our faces with as much food as possible. The adults would later sip coffee with their desserts and talk about whatever it was they talked about, then the men went off to watch football on TV while the women were left to clean up everything. Meanwhile, we kids tried to play games through the pain of strained bellies and the sleepy haze of L-tryptophan.
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