Getting ready for Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is about a week or so away and many of us are beginning to shop for our traditional Thanksgiving dinners. Our shopping lists include turkeys and corn, stuffing and cranberries, pumpkin for pumpkin pie and sweet potatoes most likely. These foods are so powerfully attached to the celebration of Thanksgiving for us that it hardly would seem like Thanksgiving without them. When I was in Belgium for a year studying with 30 other American students, our advisors promised us a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. The menu included squash soup, fried potatoes of some sort, a meat that they claimed was turkey (but looked more like a red meat of some sort), no cranberries, no sweet potatoes, no stuffing. I think I remember dumplings and a few other side dishes added in as well. To 30 homesick American college students away from home for their first Thanksgiving, this was not the traditional feast they were expecting. So after dinner, we all made a stop at McDonald's. This moment taught me how important memories and tradition are as well as the symbolism of food for us in celebrations. But did you know what the original pilgrims most likely had to eat? When the Wampanoag people and the Colonists sat down to their three-day feast to give thanks, they dined on lobster, fish packed in salt, dried and smoked meats, and freshly caught wild game. They did not eat corn on the cob (as Indian corn was only good for making corn meal, not eating whole) or eat pumpkin pie or cranberry sauce since sugar, yams, or sweet potatoes had not yet been introduced to the New England region.

So, as we prepare our Thanksgiving tables, let's remember how traditions help us connect to our history, but let's also make new memories, new legacies of thankfulness to pass on to future generations.