Thanksgiving 2006
Our family wishes all of you a safe and happy Thanksgiving Day.
Our daughter Kate arrived this afternoon and according to her, traffic was already congested and slow. Elizabeth is getting things ready for the Thanksgiving dinner...she is making the pies tonight and already preparing some of the side dishes."Thanksgivings" were pretty typical in South Dakota. Early in the day, we'd either go hunting or look for places to hunt once the season reopened. The television was always on, and it seemed that there were football games all day long. I can't recall watching that many football games in its entirety, and the only memorable game I recall happened a few days before Thanksgiving in 1968. The New York Jets were leading the Oakland Raiders, and with one minute to go...NBC quit broadcasting the game to air "Heidi". We had two camps in our family - those who liked football groaned and those that hated football cheered. Needless to say, the Oakland Raiders scored two touchdowns in the final minute of play and won the game. It upset a lot of football fans
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Thanksgiving Dinner usually began around
4:00 o'clock P.M. Of course there was always a turkey
on the table. It was dad's job to carve the turkey, and sometime
during the '60s the carving knife was replaced by an electric carving
knife. I'm not certain if it worked better than a regular carving
knife...but it was new technology and that was what the 60s were all
about anyway.
The turkey would then be placed on a turkey platter. It has been many years since I've seen this platter, but for some reason, I think it looked something like the one on the left. Dad would carry the platter out to the dining room, and the turkey became the table's centerpiece. As our family grew, we also set plates and table settings on the folding card table. Generally the oldest sat at this table, but after we started college, we were allowed to eat at the "big table" again. I can visualize "the menu". Mom had a candied sweet potato and marshmallow dessert recipe that we all liked. I may have to ask Merida for those recipes, as well as other things Mom cooked on Thanksgiving and Christmas Days. ...and after dinner, all the children cleared the table, washed the dishes, and cleaned up the kitchen. We did have an automatic dishwasher, but Mom never liked the noise it generated. Most of us like "drying dishes" rather than "washing dishes", and as a "dryer" we also had to put away the dishes, utensils and pans. Once this chore was done, we'd race back to watch TV...for a number of years, the program we'd watch was The Wizard of Oz. |
One other thing...it was two years ago that we published this web site for the first time. It was fairly primitive back then. We included some Family Stories and Pictures in the original edition. There was a "Front Page" (home page), but it contained default stuff provided by Microsoft (didn't realize that I could actually change something on this page :) ). We've come a long way since then, and want to thank everyone for their personal contributions to this site. It is the reason why so many come back each week.