Remembering Thanksgiving

I was visiting at my daughter's in northern Illinois for the last two weeks, but the Thanksgiving feast is to be held at my little house-on-a-slab in Indiana.  At home are all of the non-perishable trappings for the side dishes.  The task remained to purchase "the boid".  Jewel/Osco in the Chicago 'burbs, a large supermarket chain that Indiana doesn't have, was advertising name-brand turkeys for $.48/pound with an additional $25 purchase...so I trekked out to get one.  As supermarkets go, Jewel is higher than Walmart and MUCH higher than Aldi's, but they did have some good sales that would contribute to the $25 purchase, and I really didn't figure I was going to find turkeys for much less than that sale price.  I came home with a frozen 16+ pound bird for just under $8.  I'm happy with that!

The temperatures here have dropped like a stone over the last few days, and with that, come the memories of Thanksgivings past.  I don't remember much about the earliest family feasts, but the ones I do remember were most always held at my grandparents' farm near Streator, IL.  I recall at least two occasions when I was driving down from the Chicago area in a snowy white-knuckle trip to get home for the holiday.  One particular trip, I was behind a slow-moving salt truck and grateful for it.

My mother was always the cook.  Didn't matter that she had two later-adult daughters, Mom did the honors...and the rest of us took it for granted.  I've already written about the time that my grandfather didn't remember eating the feast meal because he'd had tee-many martoonis prior to the meal, and the time that the rest of us weren't totally sure that the meal would happen because Mom was somewhat inebriated, for the same reason.  Then there was the time that Dad went rabbit hunting on Thanksgiving Day and fell on his shotgun because he thought he could outrun the rabbit he had winged.  Shattered his pinky finger which later required surgery and an overnight stay in a hospital.  (It's a wonder the gun didn't discharge and kill him!)  But I digress....

For a couple of days prior to Thanksgiving, there would be several loaves of bread left open to get stale, to be used for stuffing.  (Stove Top had not been invented yet.)  Mom crumbled the bread into a roasting pan with onion, celery, and spices--the best of which was sage--and broth.  Most went into the turkey's cavity.  The rest went into a casserole dish into which oysters were added.  (Ewwww...!)

Mom and Dad didn't buy frozen turkeys because they wanted BIG birds.  To get a 25-pounder, they had to order it special from the grocery store.  It wasn't so much that our family was big enough to warrant that big a bird; more like they just very much liked leftovers.  My father, who was always hungry as a kid, would absolutely gloat over the size of our Thanksgiving turkey!  In order to get that sized bird cooked in time for a farm family to eat, Mom would sometimes have it in the oven by 5:30 AM.  (Farm people expect the big meal of the day to take place noonish.)

 Over time, Mom decided to make things easier on herself, so dinner time was eased into the afternoon, which meant that people would be hungry for lunch when she wasn't inclined to provide another meal due to feast preparations.  That started the tradition of hors d'eouvres.  Along about 11:00 AM, a card table was set up in the living room, and on it went chips and California Onion Dip (a family favorite), cheeses and crackers, raw oysters with lemon juice on the side, big shrimp and cocktail sauce (enhanced with wasabi that we'd brought from Japan), and pickled herring.  We all fell on that table like a bunch of vultures at a kill.  (In fact, sometimes we were so full from the appetizers that we weren't hungry for the feast!)   Oh, the memories!

(I have added this section since this was originally posted; hence, the bold print.)  
When my grandparents were still alive, Mom always made two pumpkin pies from scratch, and one mincemeat pie.  (Who eats mincemeat pie????  I don't think I ever even tasted a single piece...just because of the name!)  Mom's pumpkin pies were always quite dark in color due to spices, and it troubled her that they always "sweat".  They would develop droplets of water on top.   She read Homemaker's Extension articles about how to prevent that, but none of us complained, so she learned to stop worrying.

After I was married and spent some Thanksgivings with my husband's family, there were other issues to deal with.  Grandma Helen cooked the bird the day before so she could have the mess out of the kitchen on Turkey Day, but Grandpa Artie always complained that she overcooked the turkey, making it too dry for his liking.  The Dry Turkey Complaint became a yearly event and a family joke.  None of us took it seriously because we weren't cooking it or judging it.  It was just good!  

Since the McNarys were Indiana people, they provided a Thanksgiving eating tradition that I had never experienced before: egg noodles.  Along with stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls and other huge carbohydrates, there was also a big pot of egg noodles.  I watched as family ladled the noodles onto their mashed potatoes while putting gravy on the turkey and stuffing.  My mother would have called that "gilding the lily", but it was tradition--if not in all of Indiana, at least in that household.  (Since several big local grocery stores sold out of Reames Homestyle Egg Noodles well before Thanksgiving, I suspect it is a wide-spread Hoosier thing.)   

My mother died on the day after Thanksgiving in 1986.  She'd had a stroke in October and was on a rehab floor of the hospital in Streator.  Somehow, she'd had some kind of set-back and was sent back to acute care, but she confessed that she didn't think she could handle not being home for the holiday.  Dad, God bless him, decided to have the feast at the farm in spite of Mom's absence, so I went over to assist...and my then-husband and I had a falling out that determined he would leave for Indiana to see his other kids right after the holiday was over.  I refused to let our daughter go, due to circumstances.  I'll spare the details of the day, but I was aware because of a phone call to Mom that all was not well.  I did what I could to get her moved to see a cardiologist, to no avail.  Mom left us with no one from the family with her--only the hospital nurses.  When I called my spouse in Indiana along about midnight with the news, he had already left for Illinois.  He was too late.

Thanksgiving was never quite the same after that, but the traditions remain.  Mom would have it that way!  People come and go.  Thankfulness goes on forever.  I am so very grateful for what I had which has made me what I am.  I believe this year's Thanksgiving takes place on the same day of the month that it did 24 years ago when our mother left us.  Thanks, Mom, for being my role model and friend.  My turkey feast will never taste as good as yours, but I keep trying!