Thanksgivings, Past and Present

Well, Just One More Little Helping

How can I even be thinking of another piece of pie?  After eating turkey, stuffing, potatoes, gravy galore, peas, sweet potatoes, salad, and fresh made cranberry sauce four hours ago, how can I even think of food! There are enough leftovers to last several days. The pie won’t last that long, because it always seems like a very rational offering for breakfast. No bacon and eggs for me first thing in the morning. They have to wait until mid-morning before I even want to look at them. So pumpkin pie it will be tomorrow.

My daughter is a medical transcriptionist and has decided to work part time for two or even three companies and pay for her own medical insurance, rather than depend on one company that always seems to run out of work at crucial times. Signing up with a new company is time-consuming, with each one having their own software and idiosyncrasies. She has not had any extra time for doing anything but struggle to get all her equipment set up to suit her new employers. When she first started in this field almost fifteen years ago, it paid twice as much as it does now. Then, most of the medical transcription companies started outsourcing the work to India. Although many companies gave it up and brought back the work, the pay didn’t come back to the same rate it used to be.

So, we shared the work of preparing our holiday dinner but ate it alone. We had invited her daughters but they find the trip out here too far to come. They don’t understand it is just as far for us to go into town, and much more expensive, not only paying for our dinner, but the cost of gas for the 150 mile trip, and the lost time at work for my daughter.

It was a strange dinner, eating alone. I thought of times past eating at a large table made longer with all the extensions put in, with eight or more people sitting around it passing large bowls of food to each other. There would be my mother and father, my sister me, and the four hired men, and Gertie, the hired girl and her little boy, Danny. Mrs. Peckham, a friend of Mother’s was sometimes with us too. Mother’s menu would have been much better than mine today. We would have had a large turkey to be carved at the table, three kinds of vegetables, creamed onions, rutabegas, and peas, besides two kinds of potatoes – candied yams and mashed potatoes, and a green salad as well as a jellied salad.  There would have been , four kinds of pie - apple, cherry, mince and pumpkin. There was always plenty of everything so that nothing ran out. Or so it seems to me now. 

I don’t remember either of my two sets of grandparents ever coming to our house for holiday dinners, but I remember going to my father’s parents farm in Waverly, Pennsylvania where there was a table accommodating about 20 people. They had a man doing their cooking and he had a helper. That was before I had any appreciation of  food and I only ate enough to satisfy my father and made an escape from the table as soon as possible. There were so many rules to watch out for around my grandfather and my father.

At my own table when my children were growing up, we ate pretty well. I sure worked hard to put on a big spread and worked for days beforehand to prepare it.Unfortunately, what I remember best were the dinners after TV had been introduced. Everyone would eat their food fast and go in to watch TV. The serious eating was done later when everyone made turkey sandwiches and had small helpings of other things they might have liked.

 I do believe the holiday dinners I have enjoyed most were the ones my husband and I ate at the Navy mess hall after the children left home, and when navy trained cooks and bakers still did all the cooking. They put on feasts no one could surpass! There was everything you could think of no matter what part of the country you called home. The baked desserts were fabulous. The best thing was that I didn't have to cook or do the dishes.

 Those were the days.