Thanksgiving Then and Now

Tim, my Grandfather Dear, and my Aunt Ann
on Thanksgiving Day, 1953, which also happened
to be my first birthday anniversary.

My memory of Thanksgivings in Camas or Portland* from the 1950s through the 1970s is imperfect, as is it about those in Kentucky and North Carolina up until about 10 years ago because I tend to not be able to distinguish between holiday gatherings and other big dinners with friends and extended family.  They run together. But I’ll do my best to recount a classic Thanksgiving feast at my Grandmother Dear’s in Camas as a child and teenager, and a couple particularly memorable Thanksgivings during my adult years.

The classic.  Imagine this at the lovely little brick house on the right overlooking LaCamas Lake, the house above Leadbetter Road just as you turn off State Highway 500 north of Camas: The men, say, an uncle, my dad, and Tim (Grandfather Dear—we never called him that) and us boys sitting on the couch and cushy chairs on the western end of the front room (it was one space that contained both the living area and the formal dining table) while the women are preparing the meal and setting the table.  This is how it was and nobody imagined that the men would help in the kitchen, and it never occurred to the women that there was anything wrong with the arrangement.  They were happy to serve and to impress us with their culinary prowess. The adult men being the primary “breadwinners” and us to follow someday in their footsteps, our sole job was to come to the table promptly when called, which was hard enough as I recall, because it usually took several insistent attempts to convince us to end the flow of conversation and move ourselves.

Tim sat at the end of the table with his back to the windows, he probably carved the turkey, and Grandma Dear sat on the opposite end to be nearest the kitchen.  We never said grace or a prayer or blessing.  I think when all the dishes were in place on the table and after Grandma seated herself, probably as the last person, she likely gave a signal to begin.  We began.  The only controversial topic discussed at the table was whether to pass to the right or left.  The only other topic was food.  There was a lot to say about food, apparently, because Grandma Dear was the most amazing cook you’d ever meet.  Whenever the conversation threatened to flag, she’d insult her work, knowing that somebody would chime in to compliment her and the masterpieces.

Her name was Blanche, but this was not French cooking.  The turkey, steaming and tender and browned to perfection. Mashed, whipped potatoes loaded with milk, and if my Aunt Ann were there, laced with garlic. (But maybe I’m thinking of roast beef with garlic.)  Gravy, thick, but not too thick, and salty.  You’d make a crater in your potatoes, and pour the gravy over it, the turkey, and the sage dressing that actually was cooked inside the turkey.  Seems like there was a vegetable like string beans. Then of course cranberry dressing, both the delicious sweet jelly kind from a can and the homemade of ground cranberries, orange peal, and other sour unpalatable things that adults crave.  Don’t forget some kind of biscuits or rolls, scratch made. Jam. Naturally, the conversation became lively—to an extent even threatening to overturn the table—when the highly divisive issue of dark or white meat arose.

As you know, cranberries are grown in bogs and harvested by means of rakes.  What you don’t know is that some of them grow tall and are called High Bush Cranberries.  Our daughter in Alaska delights in eating them in the winter, fresh picked frozen solid right off the bush. They’re sour. Years ago the wife of a Methodist pastor I knew in the Camas area drank cranberry juice to ward off bladder infections. I bet you weren’t expecting me to tell you this.

Lastly at that classic meal: dessert and coffee, the latter in tiny cups on saucers. You’d likely have three choices for dessert: pumpkin pie, apple pie with flaky Crisco crust, or my favorite: both of them.  Whipped cream sweetened with sugar for the pumpkin pie, vanilla ice cream for the apple pie, and half-and half-for the coffee.

After dinner, the men would retire to their well-earned chairs to tell biographical stories while the women put the leftovers away and washed dishes.  It’s possible, just possible, that one of the men would help with the dishes, but as far as reality is concerned, this idea is merely theoretical.  I know for a fact that we boys helped put the leftover pie away; it in glass pans was kept untended and neglected on the kitchen counter and any time you liked you could slice a piece and eat it out of your hand.

The featured photograph is of Tim carving a turkey with my aunt Ann looking on. This photo came from a roll of film that contains pictures of my Great-grandparents, the Toners, at their family home in Central Oregon and of me there as a one-year-old child.  So, I’m pretty sure the turkey carving scene is located at the Toner’s place.  I downloaded the photo from my brother's archive and zoomed in. The goblets are filled with milk. My aunt is eating a piece of cake, which she shouldn’t have because she had had Type One diabetes from birth. She passed away at age 34.  I’m sad right now just thinking about her. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a special no-sugar dessert for her.) And right next to her is a napkin with the image of a round cake on it, and on top of the cake is stuck ONE candle.  So, the cake is my birthday cake!  And the day was also Thanksgiving Day!  When I checked online for a calendar to confirm this, I found an article about President Eisenhower’s National Thanksgiving Proclamation for 1953. One thing he wrote was:

“Especially are we grateful this year for the truce in battle-weary Korea, which gives to anxious men and women throughout the world the hope that there may be an enduring peace…”

My dad was in Korea then. I posted a link to Eisenhower’s proclamation here.

My brother sent me another old family photo of one of my granduncles, Vick, wearing an apron and selecting kitchen utensils from a drawer. In the background is a turkey in a pan. I can’t tell you anything more about the photo without digging around. Regardless, the photo is proof our men did wear aprons on some occasions.

The dinnerware shown in the photo on the left below is an heirloom set from my side of the family, but I’m not sure now who it belonged to.  I always thought it had been a wedding present to my grandparents, the Dears, but certain expert sources on the internet, that infallible authority, sources like sellers on Etsy, suggest that it was made in the earliest 1950s, which means it could have been a wedding present to my parents!  We never used this set.  Nobody ever used it, perhaps.  The labels on each piece identify them as “Franciscan Fine China, Acadian Gold, Made in California.” There’s so much of this stuff for sale “As New” everywhere, I don’t think anyone anywhere ever used it—it’s too delicate.  What we ate from at my Grandma Dear’s fancy meals was pure white china, called “Cloud Nine Franciscan Whitestone Ware” made in Japan by “Gladding McBean & Co.” We have that set stored safe in boxes.  Some of what has survived over the years is chipped from loving use. I’ve included a photo of three intact pieces on the right below.

Members of our family on Tim’s side played a historical role in the turkey business.  His brother served as Secretary of the Oregon Turkey Improvement Association. You can thank us for the Butterball. My grandparents the Dears had good friends who were turkey farmers. The Schmidts.  I think I have a memory of them carrying about their persons the acrid smell of turkey manure. We visited their house once. Every flat surface, including 90% of the floor was piled with stuff.  There were pathways down the center of each room. It was fascinating. I used the Schmidt’s house as a model for the house of the main character of my short story, “Ms. Thurman’s Intervention”, she, a hoarder who, it seemed, “studied the angles of repose.”  You might enjoy the story.  Plot twists and a surprise ending. The story is on this blog somewhere.

From that classic Thanksgiving dinner in Camas I jump ahead to another more contemporary classic at my wife Edie’s family home on the mountainside 180 acres above Black Mountain, North Carolina, in the windowed dining room of a log house her grandfather built in the 1930s.  I’ll only mention one thing here, something absent in our Camas holidays: a sung blessing.  Maybe a dozen adults in the room plus a number of children at side tables.  Most of us were comfortable and practiced at singing.  Edie’s mom was Episcopalian with a bishop in her ancestry and a son-in-law bishop-to-be, so the group was highly influenced by “high church” culture. We sang a complicated three part round, or canon, of “hallelujah” by the 18th Century English composer, William Boyce.  The room resounded acoustically with the echoing, natural overtones and built-in musical chords and overlapping melody. No professional choir sounded better.

I’ve posted a link here to a YouTube video of the canon reproduced by an electronic simulation of human voices.  The reason for this odd idea is because I don’t like any of the human performances I’ve found on the internet.  Most of them feature an arrangement adding instruments and placing the last note of Part A an octave up, presumably for children’s voices.  I prefer the original version that lets the basses rumble.

Moving on. One year when all our adult children were home we moved the dining table outside onto our 500 square foot deck and bundled up against the cold.  Another year when all of our children but one were occupied elsewhere, we, three of us, stuffed our fulsome, traditional Thanksgiving dinner with the trimmings into backpacks and carried it all up to a high mountaintop bald, and then finished the day with an exhausting long hike along a ridge and down a steep trail deep with a layers of slippery leaves until well after dark.  Most of the time at the end, I either scooted on my backside or swung from rhododendron trunk to trunk beside the trail. As that daughter says, there are two kinds of fun.  Type One fun is fun while it’s happening and fun in memory.  Type Two is terrifying, painful, or grueling, and fun only in memory.  The dinner was One, but the second half of the hike, Two. (There's another kind of fun, Type Three, and that's when the natural world around you has gone wild with wind and rain, you fear the roof might blow off, trees are falling everywhere, you suddenly live on riverfront property, the long-distance views are much improved, the power is out, and all the roads are blocked. It's fun while it's happening but not so much in memory.)

Now I jump ahead to this present week of 2024 when we actually have no plans for Thanksgiving.  Nothing firm whatsoever.  One child is in Vietnam or Thailand doing a visa renewal, and another lives in Alaska, but is visiting friends in Texas. A third will be in the Caribbean. One lives up east. The other two children will be someplace else and Edie and I are on our own.  Admittedly, I feel a little abandoned, but I’m not sad. We will be thankful and enjoy the day one way or another.  I’m not bad at improvising and who knows what will happen?  And there will be other family gatherings in the future.  At least half of the children have recently mentioned their interest in buying property next to us individually or severally.  I don’t want the criminal internet world to know, so I will delete this following information soon, but my birthday is sometime around Thanksgiving and we expect a family party here.  My official Facebook birthday, by-the-way, is January 1, 1900.

We will have a nice meal on Thanksgiving, just the two of us, and then maybe we’ll hike up into the tornado zone through and around the hundreds of downed and broken hardwood trees to the ridge above our house, and then if possible make our way up to the Blue Ridge Parkway that has been closed since Hurricane Helene, due in part to the road having been obliterated in some sections.  I love the natural universe, especially wilderness—the wild places of the world where humans may visit but can not live for very long.  With Helene, wilderness came to us, to just outside the doors, windows, and walls.  So, despite all the destruction and the continuous work of cleaning up and restoring order to our home place, I have to be thankful, and I am. We witnessed up close an amazing natural event.  As I write this just after 5:00 in the morning, it’s dark and rainy outside.

Last Sunday we listened to some ancient Russian Orthodox chant that was notated in the 1400 and 1500s. Much of it was different musical settings of Psalm 135. I quote one small section.

“Praise the Lord…

“The Lord does whatever pleases him,

In the heavens and on the earth,

In the seas and all their depths.

He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth;

He sends lighting with the rain

And brings out the wind from his storehouses.”

So, that’s Thanksgiving then and now.

*My Hunt grandparents lived in Portland.

The gravy boat above is from the Acadia set
and the three pieces to the right (or below) are from the 
Cloud Nine set, the one Grandma Dear
used at all of her company meals.  It's nice
that pieces from both of these may be purchased 
though they were made decades ago.