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I’ve always been on the wrong side of Thanksgiving. Don’t misunderstand here. I love the holiday. I would, and did, give genuine and grateful thanks for anything that got me out of the fifth grade for two days!
And this is mostly a history lesson. I don’t think anyone enjoying the turkey and dressing on Thanksgiving today is old enough to remember when they made the kids wait until all the grown-ups had stuffed their faces. We were told to “Go out and play. We’ll call you when it’s your turn to eat!”
They wouldn’t even let us in the kitchen or dining room! And Heaven help us if we asked for a cold biscuit…
It was excruciating and blatantly unfair. And surely broke at least seventeen child labor laws…and you talk about a kick in the gut to our young self esteem! It was like kids were suppose to “know their place” or something. If there was a teaching moment here, it completely escaped us.
You want to know the “stranger than fiction part”, my very own dear, sweet, loving Mother was the ring leader! And it didn’t matter if we ate at our house or Pa and Gran’s, Uncle Clifford’s or Aunt Beatrice’s... She would turn aside to (rather sternly I thought) remind us that we were to wait until all the grown-ups had finished before coming to the table.
That’s the same Mother who read a bedtime story to me every night, cried when she picked the Como Road gravel out of my knee after a bad spill, warmed the ear medicine so it would be less of a shock to my system, leaped off the couch to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich at my mere suggestion that I might be hungry an hour after supper…
The meal never started at noon. It was mostly Aunt Ruby Nell and Granny’s fault.’ Course, they had help from Aunt Adell and Beatrice. They’d start cooking and talking before daylight. It appeared to me they did more talking and laughing than cooking! Or maybe it just takes a long time when you’re preparing for fifty-seven people.
The grown-ups would sit down around 1:30. I’d had nothing since two bites of a link sausage at breakfast. Uncle Womack didn’t eat, he grazed. Uncle Hugh didn’t allow he was giving proper “Thanks” until he’d eaten through six helpings of everything! F. D. would take one bite and tell two stories. And then one more bite and two more stories…
That Margaret Mitchell lady wrote “Gone with the Wind” in less time than it took those old people to eat one Thanksgiving meal!
Now remember, all of us kids are outside playing (and starving). But we’d check by the dinning room window from time to time and marvel at how rapidly the turkey, dressing, ham, green bean casserole and marshmallow topped sweet potatoes were disappearing.