This morning as 6 sat back in his easy chair, with a hot cup
of coffee, gazing out the window of his office, he began to think about Thanksgiving
back in the day. It was a simple time, 6
did not wake up Thanksgiving morn, roll over in his bed, reach for the remote
turn on the 60 inch LED TV, with cell phone in one hand and iPad in the other,
and let himself be entertained with useless dribble from the electronic world. No
he woke up to the fragrant orders of the season, fresh turkey roasting in the
stove, homemade pecan rolls, bacon and eggs, and a big tall glass of milk! Sometimes you really wonder if we really have
made progress. 6 is going to give a
little history lesson of how the dinner was prepared when 6 was a lad vs. now
when he is a grumpy old man.
Take the turkey: today we go to the grocery store, buy $25
dollars worth of stuff and get a turkey for $.99 lb. this could be done weeks
before the big day, because what you get is a 25 lb free range hockey puck all wrapped up in a
plastic bag. You take it home put in you new fangled fridge for several days to
thaw, and at 6:00 AM come to find out that is still a hockey puck, so you take
it out of the fridge and hope that the ice melts in time for you to put it in
the oven. The reason that you have kept
it in the fridge is so that in the thawing process you don’t get bacteria to
form on the bird. It is all about health. Back in the day, you went to the
store on Monday, paid .10 cents a pound for un-plucked and .20 cents a pound
for plucked bird, and of course you got the un-plucked bird, put it in a
covered roasting pan, placed it on the back porch and hoped that the raccoons
did not find it. Who ever heard of bacteria 40 years ago? Now the plucking of
the feathers was a real event, if one has never done it before let me tell you
from experience it is very difficult, and you end up with feather all over you
and your little fingers are num and sore from being jabbed by each and every feather.
But that was not a problem because when you got the bird de-plucked, you then
had to go to the garden to pick the green beans. I now know why Thanksgiving is
in November instead of July, it is not because of the pilgrims, it is because
your hands were so cut up from the de-plucking that it stopped all of the blood
from getting on the frozen green beans. But today, for the green beans you get
them flash frozen from the same store you got your frozen turkey, you just have
to put the bag in the nuke machine for 5 minutes and they are ready to eat!
Well on about this time the sun would start to come up from the eastern sky and
it would be time to chop some wood for the fire. So 6 would then proceed to the
shack/shed/cottage whatever you know it as, find the axe and commence chopping
wood, for the fire that would warm our hearts for the day. The reason that 6 had to wait for the sun to
come up was he had to walk for hours in the woods trying to find a tree had
lived a good life, but was now ready to be turned into ash. 6 cut the tree
down, cut the logs, split the logs and carried each piece up the hill to the
house. Now mind you we did not have a chain saw or log splitter, all I had was
one simple axe, that the head of the axe keep coming off, and the edge on the
blade was more suited for breaking large blocks of concrete instead of cutting
wood. Today what do we do, well we flip a switch and you have an instant fire.
Well I think you now get the idea… oh one last thing… I bet you wonder what
everyone else was doing while I was working my fingers to the bone…. Well that
is simple, 7 and 8 were sitting in the house in their PJ’s eating breakfast all
wrapped up in blankets watching Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, and the cookie
monster’s in the Macy’s day parade. 5
was still sung as a bug in his bed, 4 was giving 7 and 8 breakfast, 1 was
trying to catch a mouse, while 2 was telling him what kind of mouse it was. 3
was getting a shower, while 0 was in the basement fixing the water pipe that
sprung a leak over night, while 0A was in the kitchen making the feast. Now I
am not sure what happens at everyone’s Thanksgiving, but at around 5 PM we all
settle down sit around the table just like we did in years past and enjoy the
best gift of all…. Family.
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