Thanksgiving week

I'm thinking back to the week of Thanksgiving, back when...

Three days of school -- yeah!

Since Monday is almost over, that means only two days of school left this week.

Oh, right, I'm in the real world, not back in Runnemede in 1952.

But, I enjoyed the whole week of Thanksgiving when I was growing up. I think anticipation was a great part of the enjoyment. Anticipating a wonderful dinner. Anticipating olives. Anticipating ginger ale. Anticipating pumpkin pie (or any pie). Anticipating pickles. Anticipating mom's cole slaw. Anticipating turkey SKIN. The skin was the best anticipation.
Anticipating seeing my cousins and aunts and uncles. Anticipating daddy's Thanksgiving prayer. Anticipating snow.

In school we were hard at work making leaf place mats -- you know grab some fallen leaves that are still in decent shape, pull out two sheets of wax paper, put the leaves between the two sheets of wax paper, and then iron the wax paper sheets together. There you have it -- a place mat. We were also making multi-colored construction paper turkeys. Pilgrim hats. And of course, we were being told about the first Thanksgiving, and learning to sing "We Gather Together." All this in school. And yes, we were taught in our public school in the 50s that the first Thanksgiving was a good experience for the new people on the block -- that would be the immigrants that came to America around 1620, and the Indians that lived here already. And the event was a sharing event with both sides sharing what they had with each other and being grateful for just being alive. It was a religious feast, I believe.

Then the anticipation was over and it was Thanksgiving morning, which was always cold, cold, cold. We would get up, get dressed for church, go to church, and then come home to the wonderful aroma of cooking turkey. How antsy we were! We wanted to eat NOW! Of course, it was usually around 2:00 p.m. by the time everything was ready to be chomped on. And the relatives would begin to arrive, either just prior to our eating or just after we ate, and then in the evening the cousins, aunts, uncles, siblings, and parents would enjoy another meal of leftovers.

The day after Thanksgiving wasn't a shopping day for us. It was a day to play, yeah. It was also, I think, the day Santa came to town.

My brother reminded me of the years when Santa came to visit us on Christmas Eve in a fire engine and gave each of us children a gift. But I digress. This is, reminder to self, supposed to be about Thanksgiving week.

Saturday was the end of the week, and soon we'd be back in school, starting our rehearsals for the Christmas program at school.