We never had family or friends over on Thanksgiving Day when I was growing up, but it was always a busy day around my house nonetheless. My mother always a turkey, and it was my job to help with the dressing to stuff the bird with. Those were the days when we didn't go to the store and buy a Stove Top Stuffing mix. Oh no. We started with two or three loaves of bread, manually tearing slices into thumb sized pieces until we had enough to fill the bird and some more besides, and we mixed our own spices to season it with.
While I for was doing that, my mother for her part would prepare a home made chicken soup from an old world german recipe she got from her mother. When I say homemade, I mean homemade. No cans here. It started by boiling the chicken and then removing the meat from the bones. Add some fresh vegetables and secret spices, and let it cook on the stove top slowly for four or five hours to really get the flavor right.
Just about the time she was putting the soup on the stove, I finishing up with the tearing of the bread. At that point, my mother had a special old world mix of spices she used to season the torn bread, and once properly seasoned, the stuffing was put into the bird to overflowing, and into the oven it went. Along with it went any extra stuffing that wouldn't fit into the bird -- in oven proof bowls of course -- and some sweet potatoes wrapped in tin foil.
About an hour before the bird was ready to come out of the oven, mom prepared something she called Armenian String Beans. I don't remember too much about them except that tomatoes and onions figured into the mix. No canned stuff here. Fresh beans were washed and hand cut, onions were hand peeled and diced onions, and the same for the tomatoes. Some other ingredients too. Boy that was good.
She also prepared a special lemon sauce, made from the chicken soup that was still on the stove and simmering to keep it warm. Sounds strange doesn't it. A lemon flavored sauce, thickened to a creamy texture, coming from chicken soup of all things, though you wouldn't know it from the taste. This sauce was used as a topping for a hugh bowl of rice. I loved that sauce. I think I have the recipe for it around here someplace. While she was doing that, I was making the homemade dinner rolls, under her supervision of course.
And lets not forget the pumpkin pies. Those she and I used to make the night before. I made the pie shells, from scratch of course, preparing and rolling the dough, and shaping the shells in the metal pans she used, while mom created the filling from some pumpkins she had bought at the store and the spice mix her mother had taught her.
And what were my dad and my brother doing while my mom and I worked the kitchen? Why silly, they were watching football of course.
Anyway, after five or six hours of work on Thanksgiving Day, we were ready to eat, usually around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. And of course, we always had leftovers of everything for a week. Ditto for Christmas. I haven't had such great meals since I left home and struck out on my own.
So the real tradition in my home seems to have been that on the holidays, everything was homemade. The cranberry sauce is about the only thing that actually came out of a can or a box on Thanksgiving, except maybe some flour and corn starch.
But that was then, and the meaning of holidays changes as you go from being a child to a kid, a teen to a young adult, to providing holiday magic for your own children, and to being a senior citizen. Things always change, and as Mr. Spock would say, "Change is the essential process of all existence."
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