Thanksgiving and the Remains of the Day

Time marches on.
It's fall 2010 and the View has moved to Ohio for the start of school, colder weather and the run up to seasonal holidays. My mind is spinning with memories. I totally missed posting about Halloween. Oh well, there's always next year.
Next week is Thanksgiving. My family and I will celebrate this lovely, unique American holiday together here in Connecticut. We will start the day with our first annual Gillespie Turkey Trot at the beach on Long Island Sound. One of us is a marathoner and she will take her daily run while the rest of us walk, talk, people watch and enjoy the playground.
After that, it's home for brunch. Think waffles, maple syrup, eggs, sausages, perhaps a cinnamon roll-we may need to take another walk after all that food.
Dinner at our house is traditional fare with roast turkey and all the trimmings.
Here's one of my favorite, easy recipes to share:
Spiced Cranberry Sauce
1 12 0z. bag fresh cranberries
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
2 1/4 tsp. finely grated orange peel
1/2 tsp. kosher salt
Add 1/2 t. ground cinnamon, 1/8 t. ground allspice, 1/8 t. ground cloves, and 1/8 t. ground nutmeg.
Bring all ingredients to a boil in heavy medium saucepan, stirring often. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until most of the cranberries burst, stirring occasionally, about ten minutes. Transfer sauce to medium bowl. Cool, cover and refrigerate. May be made up to one week ahead.
The warm spices in this version are the very essence of the holiday.
Now for the memories.
One of the things I will always remember about Thanksgiving on Scottwood, is that Dad would get up very early on Monday that week, and go to the local farmers' market to buy the biggest turkey he could find. I recall that it was often over twenty pounds, more like twenty-two or twenty four pounds. Dad was very proud of the size of our turkey and would be back from "market" as he called it, while we were preparing to leave for school. He would announce with a big smile, how large a bird he had found. We cheered and went to school carrying this piece of family news.
The turkey would be stuffed and put into an enormous electric roaster the night before Thanksgiving.
My parents would stay up late, chopping onions and celery and mixing stale bread cubes with herbs and butter. It took the two of them to wrangle all of that filling into the bird and place it into the roaster to slowly cook for several hours. We would wake up to the smell of roasting turkey. Heavenly.
We always had a big breakfast because the next meal was the Thanksgiving Feast, there was no scheduled "lunch" that day.
In the middle of the day Dad would load us into the car and take us to the zoo. This gave Mom time for herself and time to add the finishing touches on any of the menu that needed tending. We loved this outing. Dad could be very childlike at the zoo. We had to travel trough a tunnel under the road to enter and Dad joined us when we all yelled and screeched loudly in order to hear our echos. He loved the lion house and would lift each of us up high in order to get a better look at the beasts. Afterwards on the way home we sang and tried to imitate the elephants, tigers, and lions by mimicking their cries. We arrived home hungry, happy and ready for Thanksgiving dinner.
One of my jobs was to help set the table. We had a smallish dining room table and in order to seat and feed up to twenty or so for dinner, Dad had a table top custom made to be placed over our regular table. It was made of heavy wood and cut into two demi lunes, or half circles, then joined by hinges so that it could be folded in half. My brothers would go into the basement and carry it upstairs where it was laid over the table. We then covered the wood surface with newspapers, followed by white sheets and topped with an enormous, circular, white damask tablecloth. Finally we set out china, silver, crystal and linen napkins at each place. Place cards were always handmade. I remember one year, my sister Anne, (always creative) made up a little rhyme for each of us, without ever using our names. We had to guess who she meant by the rhyme. I loved mine and saved it for years, thrilled by what she wrote about me. "Small, blonde, with skin so light, in school this girl is very bright". I was eight years old.
That table was only for the adults and older brothers and sisters. The "little kids" had to sit at the dreaded Kids Table. I think I was there until I went to college! However, there were a few advantages of sitting with this elite group of children. If I had been allowed to sit at the big table, I would have had to clean my plate. As a child, I hated stuffing, and those vegetables and cranberry sauce and mince pie. At the kids table, no one noticed if I only ate a roll and two bites of turkey. Also, we could wreck havoc all we wanted and our parents were too occupied to notice.
Then came the daunting task of doing the dishes. There was no automatic dishwasher. Some of us simply made ourselves scarce, hoping nobody noticed we weren't helping, others stood in the kitchen with a towel over one shoulder, chatting but never lifting a dish, others just complained about the drudgery of it all. Everyone always tried to get out of helping, but somehow we all did our share and things were cleaned up in the end. Teamwork!
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. (No gifts) With all the effort that goes into this one, special dinner, it's a wonder Americans still go through with it the last Thursday in November year after year. Yet I remind myself every day how thankful I am to have such a great family, many friends, my health, and to be a citizen of the USA. So all the preparation that goes into making the dinner and celebrating Thanksgiving is pure pleasure.
Here's something to think about. I read about a woman in Jamestown, RI, (where my late brother Fritz once owned a home) who for the last ten years has held a Thanksgiving leftovers potluck on the Saturday after the holiday. It could also be called Save the Best for Last. Some guests bring leftovers, some use leftovers to make something new, and some begin from scratch. She declined from the start to give food assignments. She decided she wasn't going to try to control it. It's what's in the refrigerator, why worry about weather people have a balanced meal or not? The range of what turns up is vast, her guest list tops sixty-five, and is one of the most sought out invitations of the season.
I love the idea. Think I'll try it next year.
Happy Thanksgiving!