I don’t know if it’s because I ran a story telling event last night or because someone just has a great story to tell but I just got a request to run a believe-it-or-not Thanksgiving story thread. I’m game.
Believe-it-or-not Thanksgiving stories
by Chuck Tanowitz | Nov 22, 2014 | Newton | 11 comments
OK, I’ll lead off with a not-really-Thanksgiving-but-it-could have-been story.
My wife comes from Ireland so they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. It was Christmas Eve and Marie’s mom had the habit of cooking a turkey the night before. The turkey was done and was cooling on the counter in the kitchen. One of the kids came into the kitchen and found Sam the cat happily gnawing away on the turkey’s leg.
Now Marie’s mom was a bit of a germophobe. Even though Sam was her cat and she loved him dearly, she viewed her cat as the bubonic plague with four feet. The word spread among all the kids of what happened. They all knew that Frances would throw the entire turkey in the trash if she found out that Sam’s germ infested teeth had been sunk into it.
A half hour later Frances walked into the kitchen, saw the mauled leg and yelled “who’s been eating the turkey?” five kids simultaneously confessed to the crime.
The next day, the turkey was delicious and Frances was never the wiser.
There was a story–at my expense–that my mother insisted on telling at every Thanksgiving for 40 years until she passed away in 2004.
When I was only four years old, I was given the great privilege of sitting at the adults’ table at my grandparents’ house. My father’s entire extended Irish-American family was there, including all my great aunts and uncles. Even at that young age, I could tell that this particular Thanksgiving was a particularly solemn affair, and there wasn’t much conversation over dinner.
Nature abhors a vacuum, and then as now, I kept trying to fill the silence with a little levity. I still remember my parents shushing me and telling me to cut the shenanigans. Unchastened, I decided to look for ways to amuse myself and soon discovered that if you stab a boiled onion at the end with your fork you could make the middle squirt out. As my parents watched in horror, I announced to the entire table “watch this!” and stabbed as hard as I could at the end of biggest boiled onion on my plate and shot the center in an arc clear across the table onto someone else’s plate.
At first, there was a stunned, awkward silence. Then, like a dam bursting, the entire table broke out in laughter, and I was congratulated for my ingenuity. That is, until one of my great aunts, who suffered from hiatal hernias and was always an especially dour presence even on the most joyous of occasions, began laughing so hard that she had an attack, and had to be taken to the emergency room. Fortunately, she recovered and returned in time for everyone to enjoy and rave about the pies my mother made (all except for yours truly, of course, who was banished to the kitchen with the dog, where my grandmother slipped me and the dog some mincemeat pie with vanilla ice cream).
After the table had been cleared and the dishes were all washed and dried, the entire family gathered around the black and white television, to listen to President Lyndon B. Johnson address the nation. President Johnson called for a “new American greatness” to arise from the memory of the recently assassinated, young Irish-American president, John F. Kennedy, and asked for the prayers of the nation to help him move ahead. And the gathering of relatives was solemn once again.
That was Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1963 at the Mahan house on Cranston Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island.
Thank you Ted. That was a great story … and now I can’t wait to get my hands on some boiled onions on Thursday
My youngest child was born on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Since I was not to be released until after Thanksgiving, I determined that I would not be cheated out of the holiday celebration by my “confinement” and I proceeded to order EVERYTHING listed on the menu for Thanksgiving dinner! The hospital provided an incredible feast that I forced my husband to help me to ingest before he took my mother and two older children out for the holiday! We were more stuffed than any turkey that year!
One of my most fun Thanksgivings was in CT at a friend’s home. Kay and Rick live on a horse farm in Central CT. The MA Pike was bumper to bumper so I made a last minute ditch of my trip to Buffalo to have dinner with 45 of my closest relatives. Good thing I changed my plans as when I arrived my experience in deep-frying turkey came in handy. (The previous winter I ran a fundraiser at Pico where we did a turkey dinner and dancing party with a silent auction, where I spent the day with another friend cooking 33 turkeys in 3 deep-fryers.) The deep fryer was set up on their front lawn and it was a easy job (made easier with our friend Jack Daniels). This holiday involved much less anxiety than frying 33 turkeys or spending the holiday with 45 turkeys! DEE-licious (and fun)!
One more story… my birthday always falls around Thanksgiving. My aunt, Toni, always hosted Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember. She set an ornate table (all three of them), and I refer to her today as the ‘Jewish’ Martha Stewart! We always had the most incredible dessert array every Thanksgiving including homemade: Pumpkin Pie, Blueberry Pie, Cherry Pie, Deep Dish Apple Pie, Lemon Meringue Pie, Pecan Pie, Pumpkin Ice Cream Pie, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Strudel, Brownies, Mandelbroit and of course store-bought birthday cake. No one ever wanted birthday cake with all of the other good chazerai (junk food), including me!
@Janet Sterman – It sounds like Aunt Toni had it down … it’s all about the pies.
p.s. 33 turkeys ??!!?!
Jerry, I know where you can find 24 turkeys the first and third Monday of every month.
So many family Thangsgiving stories from my youth but this, not exactly a Thanksgiving story, happened yesterday. My mother is 93. She lives on Signal Mountain, a “sleepy” suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee and she moved there 18 years ago from Lookout Mountain, on the other side of Chattanooga so she thinks driving the W Road and any other road up a mountain is just a means to an end. It was 8 am, 19 degrees and she needed to go down to pick up the few things left on her list for dinner. She tried to pop her trunk but it was frozen shut. No matter. She starts her journey but didn’t get far before her trunk lid flew open. Ever under control, she pulled into a driveway, got out and closed the trunk. Back in the car, it’s sleeting now, she turns on her windshield wipers but they froze to the glass before she got much farther. Thank God, she went home and made it safely. After she told me her story, she finished with “93 is just too old to freeze to death.”
Happy Thanksgiving
Now to get on the Pike and start the snowy drive to Cheshire, CT to my daughter’s for our Thanksgiving mingling with in laws, exes and their new young wives, staunch right wing Catholic Republicans, flaming liberal Protestants, a few who are on the fence, gay and straight, public sector and private sector representatives, teachers and those who “pay their salaries” and on and on. Can’t wait.
That was definitely a Thanksgiving story Marti. It’s clear you’re giving thanks this morning that you’re 93 your old mother is still as spunky, unflappable and full of life as ever.
She’s my new role model. That’s how I want to be at 93. Heading down the mountain during the snowstorm, oblivious to the recklessness of it all, and no doubt scaring the crap out of my daughter when she hears about it.
Happy Thanksgiving