We are days away from my favorite holiday — Thanksgiving.
This year, I did something out of the ordinary; I brought a pre-cooked smoked turkey. I don’t know what to expect, but if it’s anything like I’m thinking, it’s going to be very good.
I don’t know about you, but I like smoked anything. I even had smoked chicken wings on a few occasions, and it is such a great taste, I thought, how bad can a whole turkey taste?
Thanksgiving is a holiday I really can’t wait for year after year.
When I was a child, my mom would be cooking and baking up a storm, seemingly for days — at least the desserts anyway.
She or my dad would have to get up very early in the morning to throw the bird in the oven, and I’d wake up to that Heavenly smell of turkey roasting. As each hour passed, the aroma of the baking turkey grew stronger and stronger.
While the food was cooking and baking, I’d watch Captain Kangaroo or some morning show, followed by the start of the Thanksgiving parades, particularly the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
I loved all the trimmings, including mashed potatoes (love, love, love mashed potatoes), corn, cranberry sauce, and stuffing, but only a certain kind of stuffing. I’m a stuffing snob, I guess. My grandmother Callaio made the best stuffing and gravy.
For me, Thanksgiving is all about family time. It also signified the beginning of the next four weeks of eating awful, terrible things like Christmas cookies and pies. The homemade cookies and desserts at my house were the chief’s kiss, always incredible.
It’s odd when you think about it, back then people didn’t make the money they earn now, but for some reason, there was food galore and nobody left the dinner table hungry; it was quite the opposite.
Normally, we ate between noon and 1 p.m., then you would roll out of your dinner chair and slide your way onto a living room chair, and if you were lucky, the couch.
It wouldn’t be long before the tryptophan would kick in, and it was lights out.
Sometimes we ate dessert right after dinner, and sometimes we waited, as mom would say, “Until after we digest.” What digest? I ate so much it would take two days to digest, let alone a few hours later for supper.
Speaking of supper, since we ate so early in the afternoon, by 5 p.m. the leftovers would come out of the refrigerator for round 2.
By 8 p.m., I would be waving the white flag.
Naturally, with so much food lying around, we’d be eating leftovers for days. Somehow, the leftovers seemed better than on Thanksgiving Day.
Last week, I photographed the CEO/Weinberg Food Bank Thanksgiving meal giveaway. It was incredible. CEO does the giveaway at four locations; I was at the biggest one at the Mohegan Arena at Casey Plaza.
At the arena parking lot, 200 volunteers packed trunks over a two-day period with a turkey, a bag of potatoes, a bag of yams, onions, and carrots. It was such a well-oiled machine, and CEO has been doing it for years, so there was a lot of trial and error until they had it down pat.
Here’s the thing, just at the arena, they gave away between 6,000 and 7,000 turkeys with the trimmings. In all four locations, the total is 11,000 meals. That’s a lot of meals.
It has to be rewarding and gratifying for CEO to help feed that many families for Thanksgiving.
As we all know from our history books, Thanksgiving was a product of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts, celebrating their first successful harvest in 1621. It was a three-day feast that was not referred to as Thanksgiving; that happened in 1789 when George Washington proclaimed the first national day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the new Constitution and nation.
It was Abraham Lincoln who established Thanksgiving as an annual national holiday set on the final Thursday of November, thus giving birth to the modern-day Thanksgiving holiday.
Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving earlier from 1939 to 1941 to extend the shopping season. However, the public resisted, and Congress intervened to set the official date of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November.
In the early days of celebrating Thanksgiving, the meats consisted of wild turkey, venison, duck, goose, or swan, as well as clams, oysters, and mussels. Cod and bass were also menu items.
Of course, the vegetables included corn, beans, squash, and pumpkin, but not the pie.
When Lincoln nationalized Thanksgiving, it was magazines and cookbooks that began to form the modern-day menu lineup.
Since the 1860s, food choices have been tweaked over time, adding canned cranberries, canned pumpkin, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, and even green bean casserole.
Different ethnic groups add their own flair, such as the Italians adding a pasta of sorts, the Poles adding pierogies, Mexican-Americans adding tamales, and some of the South and African Americans having mac ‘n’ cheese.
Mom always had either lasagna or ravioli as the “appetizer,” for some of us, might as well be the entire meal, because after that, who wanted to eat turkey?
No matter how you celebrate Thanksgiving, make sure you have fuel in your body to withstand Black Friday.
Quote of the Week
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” —Marcel Proust
Thought of the Week
“A heart is not judged by how much you love; but how much you are loved by others.” — Frank Morgan
Bumper Sticker
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough.” —Aesop
