Dear Mom and Dad:

One of my richest memories is of our Thanksgiving Day celebrations. I can’t recall one that didn’t include a turkey and all the trimmings. How you managed it in the Depression years with nine mouths to feed is something I’ll probably never know.

I do recall plenty of days when there was little to eat, but not on Thanksgiving Day. I remember how we always felt just a little more important than the neighbor kids because our bird was necessarily bigger. Something like having a bigger television screen nowadays.

Getting the big bird ready the night before was always fun, for us kids at least. While Mom made the pies (at least six,) we pulled the pinfeathers and singed the turkey over the gas burner.

Now they’ve taken the work, and the fun, out of preparing the turkey-- there’s hardly a pinfeather in them anymore.

Remember how we’d all sit around the big kitchen table, each doing something to help get ready for the big day? You’d finally shoo us off to bed about 10:30 and then Mom, after cleaning up the kitchen, would slip upstairs to her little den off our bedroom and listen to the radio programs on her crystal set.

This was a nightly ritual, and not even the prospect of a hectic holiday could deter her from at least an hour of fiddling with the cat whisker and adjusting the earphones for best reception.

Then would come morning. We’d purposely eat very little breakfast in order to create as large a vacuum as possible by the time we were ready for the big feast.

I must admit we small fry did little to aid in the preparations. I don’t suppose it helped much each time we’d sneak in and open the oven door to peak at the golden brown bird and get a whiff of that heavenly aroma.

Or eat the hearts out of celery stalks as we casually passed through the kitchen. But we did help get the table ready, putting in the extra leaves and moving in the piano bench and the settee.

Of course, the turkey, creamed onions, mashed potatoes, turnips, hot biscuits, old-fashioned cranberry sauce, pumpkin and mince pie were wonderful. But the real joy, I think, came in all of us being together, seated around the huge table, in an atmosphere saturated with gratitude for the good things God had blessed us with.

I recall one Thanksgiving, though, when we almost didn’t have a turkey. That was the year Dad brought home a live bird about a month ahead. “We’ll fatten him up,” he said.

I’m afraid Dad wasn’t a very good farmer. Though we pampered old Tom with everything turkeys like, he refused to eat very much and from the day we got him he started wasting away. He went from 18 pounds to a mere shadow and by Thanksgiving Day he wouldn’t have made a meal for a midget.

So at the last minute Mom rushed out and bought one that had apparently lived a happy life.

What we didn’t know was that turkeys, like humans, get lonely for their own kind and a little homesick.

Especially at Thanksgiving.

God be with you,
Jerry