Enjoy your pumpkin soup!

Happy Thanksgiving. I’d be amazed if you’re actually reading this on Thanksgiving. Some folks get there NEWspaper on Wednesday, some don’t get around to reading it till the weekend. I’m sure you’re busy. If you you’re reading this a week later, I understand. No offense taken.

So what’d ya have? White meat? Dark? Did ya go the John Madden NFL route and have a “Turducken?” Mashed potatoes? Dressing? Green bean casserole? Let me guess, cranberry something and some sort of pie? Why is it that millions of us Americans eat pretty much the same thing on Thanksgiving?

One of my fondest Thanksgiving memories was when Beth’s folks were out and instead of taking I-5 up to our cousins’ in Northern California, we decided to meander up Highway 1 along the coast. It took way longer than we thought it would, so we spent Thanksgiving night near of Hearst’s Castle. The pizza and beer was Okay, but at lunch we had stopped in Morrow Bay and had the best clam chowder on earth in a practically empty restaurant with huge windows overlooking the Pacific.

Some people’s first reaction would be pity. Thanksgiving without turkey? Sacrilege!

The truth of the matter is that the Pilgrims didn’t even have forks. Sorry, no forks, but they did have spoons, knives, and their fingers. They wiped their hands on the same napkins that they used as pot holders and tongs.

Miles Standish and Pricilla Mullins also had to some how get by without desert. They had brought sugar with them on the Mayflower but by the time of the feast, they were probably out. Oh yeah, no ovens either. That meant no pies, cakes, cookies, brown-and-serve rolls or even bread.

According to the historychannel.com Much of the first Thanksgiving was seafood; cod, eel, clams, and lobster. That makes sense, Plymouth, Massachusetts is pretty much a seafood bonanza. Notice, Allan (my father-in-law), no oysters. Maybe they waited for Christmas Eve, like you. Personally, I hate oysters, but Bethany hates lobsters, you can’t please everybody.

I understand that the Pilgrims might have had a turkey or two (wild though, not a big fat domestic tom). They and their Wampanoag Indian hosts also probably had plenty of other fowl like goose, duck, crane, swan, partridge, and yes, eagles (is nothing sacred?!). Talk about a lot of “tryptophan.” That’s that enzyme in bird meat that makes you sleepy. I bet nobody was left awake to do the dishes in then either. I for one really enjoy pheasant, you just have to be careful to pick the bird-shot out of the wound.

I tell ya what, anybody on the Atkin’s diet would have loved the first Thanksgiving. Cholesterol was the least of their worries. They were much more worried about small pox and the plague.

The menu continued with Venison, Seal (I hope no PETA members just read that). They had a little bit of stone ground wheat flour, and of course… “Indian corn.”

There was some other vegetables to, like roasted pumpkin, not as a pie, more likely soup. That one was one of George Washington’s favorites. I guess that there are only so many things you can eat with wooden teeth. Of course, Washington was a century later, don’t get your history confused.

The Pilgrims probably topped off their feast with peas, beans, onions, lettuce, radishes, carrots, plums, grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns. No Stove Top stuffing, no French's® French Fried Onions or Campbell's® Cream of Mushroom to make that green bean casserole, and no Cool Whip®. Worst of all, the Pilgrims had no cranberry gelatin goop that makes that “shloop” sound when it slides out of the can.

No Lions’ game, no Cowboy’s game, but it was only a couple of decades before they had some wicked witch-hunts.

This first feast in 1621 wasn't repeated, so it couldn’t have been the start of our tradition. In fact, the radically conservative Puritan Pilgrims didn't call it “Thanksgiving.”

To them, a “thanksgiving” was a religious day, so they went to church and thanked God for a specific event, like winning a battle. On such a day, no recreational activities were allowed, like playing games or singing. You can bet that there would be no way that pagan savages like the Wampanoag’s would be invited. The Pilgrims were actually pretty intolerant for having come here for “religious freedom.”

Our Thanksgiving in America really got started with George Washington who declared a one-time holiday. Abe Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as"...a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." F.D.R. moved it to the fourth Thursday in 1939, to keep a fifth week in November from cutting into the Christmas shopping season.

Tomorrow (the Friday after Thanksgiving), is now the busiest shopping day of the year. Save your sanity, join thousands of penny pinchers by observing it as the “National Buy-Nothing Day.” Believe me, if you even try to go to a mall tomorrow, you’ll wish you hadn’t.

Turns out that the Macy's Parade, was started in the 1920's by first-generation immigrant employees of the department store who wanted to celebrate with the kind of festival they loved in Europe. They put on costumes, borrowed 25 animals from the Central Park Zoo and marched 111 city blocks, drawing a crowd of a quarter million, which pretty much guaranteed an instant tradition.

You should have seen the parade of cars on I-5 backed up on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving full of pilgrims trying to get back home to L.A. I’m thankful that now we just go up to see our relatives Sioux Falls.