Memories of Thanksgivings Past

Thanksgiving dinner has always meant extra people at the table and lots and lots of good food.  That table was my grandmother G's table that we had inherited along with its multitudinous leaves.  It could really be a big table when we needed it to be. The chairs were some matching chairs from my grandmother G (6 chairs?) and some not-matching chairs from my grandmother N (8 chairs).  Sometimes we even had to bring out the folding chairs. For Thanksgiving dinner, my job was to get out all the table's leaves, extend the table as far as we needed to accommodate everyone, arrange all the chairs around the table evenly (sometimes including the piano bench at one end of the table if we needed it to squeeze in a couple of kids), put on the table liner (which my mother insisted we use), then a nice table cloth.

Next, my job was to set the dining room table with our "best" (Lennox) dishes or "second best" dishes (a pinkish/purple floral patterned set), along with Mom's silverware (Reed and Barton) or the silver-plate service, along with some glass goblets. I also had to remember to set out things like salt and pepper shakers, napkins (usually Mom bought some Thanksgiving paper napkins), butter (well, probably margarine), salad dressing, jam Mom had made in the summer, and condiments like Mom's picked beets, "store-bought" olives and cranberry sauce, and different kids of pickles Mom had made--bread-and-butter pickles, sweet pickles, dill pickles, and one other kind of pickle I can recall but cannot name. I also had to set out whatever we were going to drink (milk always but also water and/or punch).

I had to be a kitchen helper and "fetch-it" for my mother.  For example, I would have to retrieve the serving plates from their different cupboards.  I peeled the carrots and, if they were on the menu, potatoes.

One of my jobs was to arrange the fruit center piece--one pineapple, bunches of grapes, bananas, oranges, and apples--that sat in the middle of the table on a circular tray.

I may not have done all this when I was a wee lassie but I did grow into this role of assistant.  I know it sounds a bit like an unintentional Cinderella story here.  Maybe my brother was chopping wood for the fire place that was kept burning day and night?  Maybe he was bringing in the newspaper?  Maybe my sister had to tidy up the rest of the house or was sent to borrow something from the neighbors that Mom might have forgotten?  Honestly, I do not remember a thing about what they were doing when I was doing all that other stuff and Mom was in the kitchen cooking.

Mom had all the cooking to do.  She would make the pies ahead of time: apple, pumpkin, cherry, and mincemeat. My dad liked the mincemeat pies and she would make and can the mincemeat filling in the summer.  The mincemeat always smelled great but you could not have paid me to eat any.  Some years she would make cream pies of some sort but not always. The apple and cherry filling were, in the earlier years, fillings she had made and canned.  Later, once the apple and cherry trees had died, she used commercially-canned apple, cherry and pumpkin filling.  She would serve ice cream with the pies (not homemade ice cream, in case you wondered!).  When it was time for the dessert, this was when Mom would claim that a person always had room for ice cream since it would just melt over everything else in your stomach.

She would make a couple of jello salads ahead of time.  The one most often requested by my brother was the Christmas ribbon jello salad.  My sister liked the green jello with pecans, cottage cheese and pineapple.  I liked orange jello with Mandarin oranges and crushed pineapple.  I cannot say that she made all three but her making two was not unheard of--perhaps it depended on how many people she was feeding.

She would cook a huge turkey.  She made her own bread dressing and included carrots, onions and celery in it.  She would save crusts of bread from her homemade bread, cut it up and bake it in little squares to use for the dressing.  She might have sometimes mixed it with some commercial package like Mrs. Cubbins (sp?)--half and half.  She ground up all the bread and the vegetables together.  Usually she would put some stuffing in the bird and some stuffing in a separate pan to cook.  She also made turkey gravy--with flour.

I loved the homemade rolls. Sigh. Once in a while, she might serve warmed up rolls she'd made earlier in the week when she made her bread.  Most of the time, she would try to have fresh rolls she had made that day.  My favorite rolls were the ones using Aunt Lucile's recipe and those were the ones she made in my teen and young adult years.  They were bread twists, shaped kind of like big bread sticks.  My mom excelled at making bread and rolls. Yum!

She would make a fruit salad (probably fruit cocktail and bananas and some kind of pudding mixture), and I would likely make a "lettuce" salad, including carrots, tomatoes and cucumbers out of our garden. She would cook string beans (from our garden that she'd canned in the fall--"always make sure they boil for ten minutes" she'd say when she would be heating them up to serve), corn that we'd cut off the cob and frozen in little baggies in the fall or corn that had been frozen on the cob, and she would cook some kind of dish with sweet potatoes. I must admit, she usually cut corners and used instant potato flakes for the mashed potatoes.  Sometimes we just had cubed potatoes that were boiled, and we mashed them ourselves before pouring the gravy on them.

And after all the food was eaten or put away in the refrigerator and the table was cleaned off, Mom insisted on hand washing her own china.  She said she did not want to feel bad if someone else broke a piece.  What a lot of work she went to for all of us to have a great Thanksgiving!

Probably most years we did not have guests (and the menu and particularly the quantity did not vary much with or without company!) and some years we did have guests, mostly extended family.  I think in my very young years, the G family (my father and his siblings) would still get together for Thanksgiving and I do remember one such year with many tables set up outside on the lawn at my grandmother's house (before we lived there).  However, my memories of Thanksgiving are of my parents and my siblings sitting down to eat at my grandmother G's table in our own house surrounded by all the bounty I have described.  I have very happy and fond memories of my "Thanksgivings Past" of my youth.