Thanksgiving Day–despite the intrusion of the Macy’s parade and enough football to make Knute Rockne wonder if a little cricket would be a nice change of pace–is a harvest festival. Harvest festivals were celebrations of full barns and cellar shelves heavy with preserved vegetables. They have been celebrated for as long as there have been good harvests to be thankful for. In some cultures, harvest festivals were riotous occasions enlivened by drinking, singing, and dancing. The Pilgrims, who founded the American Thanksgiving Day, were a more sedate bunch, not given to much riotousness. The celebration of Christmas, for example, was banned in Massachusetts well into the 19th century. Thanksgiving, however, passed the Pilgrim sobriety test–especially the first Thanksgiving.
About half of the 102 Pilgrims who settled in Plymouth in November 1620 died of disease and starvation during their first winter. When the summer of 1621 ended with an ample harvest, the surviving Pilgrims were relieved and grateful to God, to whom they gave the credit. They celebrated with a feast. We continue that tradition today. For most Americans, Thanksgiving is mostly about the feasting, the aforementioned parade, and the football overdose, but for some Americans–those who live on farms or grew up on them–the old ties to harvest time remain.
I was raised on a dairy farm in Vermont, so Thanksgiving brings back harvest memories. Everybody had a garden when I was a kid. The doctor, the town clerk, our neighbors, and all my teachers got itchy, green thumbs in spring. Even the town drunkard planted some wobbly rows of peas and corn and carrots. As with all popular leisure activities, there was a lot of competition. Everyone wanted to be the first to bring in some snow peas or a bushel of sweet corn or to produce the largest, reddest tomato, something worthy of the cover of a seed catalog.
But the most visible competition was over the appearance of the garden itself. Razor-straight rows and artfully placed plantings were much admired. Careful hoeing and ruthless weeding expunged any intruding weeds and, in those pre-organic days, barrels of insecticide were sprayed to eliminate every predatory bug. A wind-driven whirly-gig or an old bathtub full of flowers might be used as homely accent pieces. Those were the old days, before wooden silhouettes of bent-over fat ladies became the mandatory garden accouterments. My busy parents didn’t follow any of these conventions.
Mom and Dad didn’t have time to “fool” with our garden. My Dad had a full-time job in a paper mill in addition to minding his herd of two-dozen milk cows. Mom had a smaller, but more difficult herd to manage–my four siblings and me. Tending a vegetable garden was something for which they had few spare moments. We kids weren’t much help, either. We couldn’t tell weeds from wanted plants and were a menace to the garden and each other when handed hoes. We also loved to eat our way through the fresh peas or pull up baby carrots and beets to rough wash under the barn tap for a snack. Mom compared us unfavorably to a mob of greedy rabbits. Dad, a very pragmatic man, avoided admonitions and simply plotted a solution to our garden problem. In what seemed a counterintuitive move, he solved the time problem by increasing the size of our garden.
Dad hooked the plow to the back of his tractor and plowed up the better part of a cow pasture, creating a garden larger than that of all of our neighbors combined. On this gargantuan plot he planted enough corn to feed a regiment. There was a patch for potatoes as large as a two-car garage and rows of beans as long as Greyhound buses. As the summer passed, cucumber vines formed a nest big enough for a pterodactyl. Dad adopted a laissez-faire approach to managing this monster. He cultivated it when he had time but didn’t set it high on his long list of chores. Mom did the same and we kids went along.
The garden passed through neat periods when we could keep it tended and less-presentable times when the weeds were as high as an elephant’s eye and worthy plants were swallowed up by useless vegetation. In this jungle, the perfection of our veggies was sporadic. Dad’s squash were an illuminating example. He saved squash seeds from year to year, mixing in new seed when necessary. The various varieties crossbred and, in a few years, he had results worthy of mutant extras in a Martian-invasion movie.
Our neighbors sniffed at our garden’s appearance, dropping plenty of blunt comments. We children–like all children–were easily embarrassed, and fretted over why we had to have such a big, messy garden. But, by the end of summer, the garden, largely under its own management, produced wagonloads of vegetables that, when canned by Mom, lasted all winter. The lapses in nurturing were overcome by numbers for, if you plant plenty of seeds, enough will survive and grow.
There was a side benefit of the big-garden approach. If you have a huge pile of vegetables of mixed quality, some will be no good but most will be serviceable and some, perhaps challenged to be all that they can be by their hard upbringing, will actually be excellent. These Darwinian beauties, put up in Mason jars, won blue ribbons by the fistful at the county fair, greatly annoying the neighbors, whose hard work and hours of tending had produced lesser results.
Some might consider these events a bad lesson in life, encouraging sloth and waste, but what I got from my father’s gardening tactic was some old Yankee wisdom rooted in the hard-life experiences of such ancestors as the Pilgrims: What works is more important than what’s pretty; while it’s good to have the admiration of your neighbors, you shouldn’t let the pursuit of their regard replace more important purposes; and finally, use the resources you have and think your way around those things you don’t have. Dad had a tractor and lots of pasture but no time. A big, ugly garden was his solution. In addition to vegetables, it produced for me a lesson in practicality and independence, qualities that were once the hallmark of New England.
The result of Dad’s approach to gardening was featured on our Thanksgiving Day table. Mom served Golden Glow pickles and mustard beans she’d canned during the summer. Our mashed potatoes came from a barrel of spuds we’d forked up from our weedy potato mounds, and those mutant, alien squash made nice pies alongside ones filled with strawberry rhubarb and mincemeat made with venison Dad had shot himself. Sure, there were also lots of store-bought items on the table, but the dishes we made from our own harvest always seemed easier to count as the Lord’s blessings. After all, He was most responsible for their cultivation.
ON THE MENU
When preparing our Thanksgiving Day meal, Mom set us kids tasks suitable to our meager skills. One year, it was a job we were well motivated to accomplish: making our favorite cookie. It was a cookie that didn’t require baking, being concocted upon the stovetop like fudge. The recipe follows:
Unbaked Chocolate-Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies
Boil together for 2 minutes,
2 cups sugar
1/4 cup cocoa
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup butter
Reduce heat and add,
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 1/2 cups rolled oats
Remove from heat and spoon drop the mixture on wax paper. Let cool.
Wrap each cookie individually in plastic to retain freshness. (Though you’ll probably finish them off long before staleness can become an issue!)
–Edward Morrow is the author and illustrator of numerous books, including The Halloween Handbook.