“Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then discover once a year is way too often.” Johnny Carson
We’re coming up to a holiday and it’s mandatory to do a heartwarming Thanksgiving story about a houseful of smells, visiting relatives and good spirits. When I was a kid the smells were from my messy cousins, the relatives lived upstairs in our two-family house and good spirits were served in martini glasses. And the heartwarming part usually came from eating too much overcooked turkey and undercooked sausage stuffing. To this very day I hate sausage stuffing, not because it causes heartburn, but because I had a cousin who left a second-hand deposit of it on the floor every year. Did I mention a houseful of smells?
I was told this column is not about nostalgia, but coping with the new millennium, so I went in search of a modern Thanksgiving. A quick survey of women’s magazines gave the impression that preparations should start sometime in April, and that serving a picture-perfect bird in any type of structure with less than 10 bedrooms was strictly verboten. I felt woefully inadequate with only two bedrooms and a common area for living and eating. I continued searching.
Cooking shows on TV were very helpful to learn how to cook a turkey, but I already knew that. You throw it in a pan, grease it up and cook it for three days and nights at about 800 degrees and everything comes out really tender. Easy, right? One show insisted that you had to defrost the bird before cooking, but that seems a huge waste of time. Another showed some ancient Aztec method of burying the carcass in a deep pit, covering it with wood chips and branches, then igniting the whole thing on fire. Well, it was late and I nodded off for a while so I’m not entirely sure if it was a turkey or a human sacrifice.
Next I turned to history since sometimes, but not always, seeing where things start gives a clue as to why they are the way they are today. Ben Franklin wanted to make the turkey the national bird of America instead of the bald eagle. Since turkeys are notoriously stupid – they’ve even been known to drown by staring up at the rain – no one is entirely sure of Ben’s intent. It is possible he meant for it to represent Congress, but that’s just a guess.
George Washington made Thanksgiving a national holiday, Abe Lincoln set the date at the last Thursday of November, and FDR moved the date back a week during the depression to make a longer Christmas shopping season. President Obama tried the same thing this year but came under criticism for trying to move the date to August. Major retailers apparently decided to go ahead with the president’s plan anyway.
I found lots of interesting facts and tidbits about the history of Thanksgiving, turkeys, shopping and cooking, but none of them provided any clues about how baby boomers are coping and dealing with the holiday now. So I finally decided to take my survey directly to the public and I set up a small polling booth at the local mall.
76% of boomers said they still have traditional turkey dinners on Thanksgiving, and a majority of that group said men are not allowed in the kitchen and women are not allowed in the TV room. I’m checking those numbers however because it seems many of the respondents were male.
Another 14% claimed to be vegetarians or vegans. By the way, on the whole they are a very nice group of people and really appreciated the free snacks and beverages I put out. The pepperoni bites were especially popular until someone saw the package they came from.
The remaining 10% told me they celebrate Thanksgiving with roast beef, lobster tails, fresh pate and champagne, and they were quite adamant they had indeed found the truest form of giving thanks. I took no sides in this survey and disputed nothing.
Finally, I visited a village on a native American reservation, known locally as “Cah-see-noh,” to ask native Americans directly what Thanksgiving meant to them. It was a short visit and I was escorted back to my car by two very nice young men who suggested that I submit my questions to a place I’d never heard of, but which sounded something like “up molasses.” I assumed they had an office in Vermont but was not able to find it when I looked the next day.
The bottom line seems to be that baby boomers are spending Thanksgiving pretty much as they always did, except now they have to pay for it, fix it and clean up after it. Some have chosen to go the traditional route of having turkey, some have abandoned eating meat and some obviously never had kids because they can afford roast beef and champagne.
No matter how they cope with it or what they eat, Americans of all ages still respect the holiday as a day of thanks after 389 years and that’s pretty impressive. And, the only ones who really have a problem coping with Thanksgiving are – you guessed it – the turkeys.
Note: The average American eats nearly 14 pounds of turkey in a year. Over 250 million turkeys are raised each year for a total weight of more than 7 billion pounds with total value over $3 billion. Another $5 million worth of turkeys are imported annually from Canada. The first Thanksgiving was in 1621 by order of William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Bay Colony. Included in the harvest celebration were the local Wampanoag Indians, who helped the English settlers to survive the previous harsh winter.
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