A little Chat About Thanksgiving Dinners

[Little Blue]

Just remembering Thanksgiving Dinners with my parents.
They have passed away and I am okay with it. They will
always be missed.

About the Dinners, my mother would make all the main
Dishes for the meal. She loved to cook and was very good.
Her two favorites of mine were a cranberry salad made from
fresh cranberries. The second one was a sweet potato and
sorghum dish.

My wife has the recipe for both of these, but she has never been
able to get them quite like my mother's. I believe that mother
left some information out. Anybody have any suggestions?

 

[Mikey]

Your Mom was most likely a seat of the pants cook, and the missing parts was the love she put in there!!! My Mom was the same way, as much as I was over her shoulder I missed a lot of things, so I just had to make them my way and put a different twist on the recipe! Food would be so boring if we all cooked the same! Happy Holidays!

 

[Willin]

Familiar story for sure. Some of the best Chefs in the world are just named 'MOM'. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.

 

[RangerRick]

My mom also made the Cranberry Salad at Thanksgiving and Christmas, The recipe was handed down from My dad's mom. Mom passed the end of October, 96 years old. But she had not been able to cook for the last couple of years. So that recipe goes back a lot of Decades. Dad insisted that she leave out the small (Pig Puffs, as he called them) Marshmallows. Personally I liked them in there, no matter whether they were healthy or not.

 

[UtahPete]

My mom, bless her soul, never learned how to cook a turkey (we're British immigrants), and extended family was an ocean away. My first real turkey dinner was at a Navy chow hall. A Norman Rockwell painting of the traditional Thanksgiving meal seemed to portray something that existed in a painter's imagination.

 

[BajaRon]

Though Christmas and Easter are arguably more important, the purity of Thanksgiving makes it my favorite holiday. It has suffered the least amount of commercialization which has effectively superseded the original purpose for these holidays for many, and that is a shame.

I know we say, ‘It’s the Reason for the Season’. But how many of us still live that truth?

You don't see nearly the commercial energy for Thanksgiving in Ads, etc., compared with Christmas, Easter, or even Halloween. Indeed, commercially we have begun to skip right from Halloween to Black Friday (which has expanded to weeks in some cases) and then Christmas these days. That's simply because there isn't the revenue generated by Thanksgiving as there is for other, more lucrative holidays.

Then there is the attempt, as with so much these days, to rewrite history to fit an agenda. Thanksgiving was a celebration of God and His goodness in preserving the Pilgrims through very rough times which began with persecution in the old country, long before embarking on their dangerous voyage to a new and hostile land.

The Pilgrims also thanked God and honored the native Indians who were pivotal in their survival. These are the truths that I have attempted to pass on to my children and grandchildren.

“Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons;” (Deuteronomy 4:9)

If we fail in this, we not only fail ourselves, but our children and our nation. To me, Thanksgiving goes hand in hand with Veterans and Memorial Day events.

May your Thanksgiving be as meaningful and pure for you and yours as it was to those who celebrated it in 1621.

 

[UtahPete]

To me, Thanksgiving goes hand in hand with Veterans and Memorial Day events.

I agree. November is a nice break between the commercialism of Halloween and Christmas.

 

[UtahPete]

Key Milestones in Thanksgiving History

• The First Harvest Feast (1621): Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people celebrated a three-day harvest festival in Plymouth, which later became the inspiration for the modern American tradition.
• First National Proclamation (1789): President George Washington issued the first national Thanksgiving proclamation, setting November 26, 1789, as a day of public thanksgiving to celebrate the new U.S. Constitution.
• National Holiday Establishment (1863): During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln declared a national Thanksgiving day on the last Thursday of November, largely thanks to a decades-long campaign by writer Sarah Josepha Hale.
• Official Federal Date (1941): Congress passed a joint resolution establishing Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November to create a uniform federal holiday.