Thanksgiving

I have always been a big fan of Thanksgiving.  Of course, "always" had to start when my family moved to America.  Our was first Thanksgiving was in Sumter, South Carolina and the base commander had invited us to his house for a southern style feast.  I remember the candied yams, cornbread stuffing and blond daughter the most.  Yeah, she was shallower than the pan the stuffing rested in.  It was a great meal and I learned early on to avoid blonds.

My grandmother lived most of her life in America but since both her parents were foreign, there were no family traditions surrounding this holiday.  "As long as there was mashed potatoes, who needs turkey?", would have been her motto.  At her table, salmon was the normal fall meal, always with mashed potatoes.

A few years ago, I did an extensive study on the entire Thanksgiving question and was rather surprised to find that nothing is carried forward from that first commemoration...

You could not have picked a worse place to land a ship - it was swampland and there was quite simply nothing there!  No game, few fish in the bay and everyone was sickly - and that was just for starters.  As the winter wore on, more and more began dying from starvation.  The ship stores were exhausted, the three men whom had rifles would be away for days in the hunt for anything.  And more died, froze to death or fell overboard and drowned.

When spring came, there were survivors, not many; two out of three were now dead.  And they knew that with spring they could plant and prayed more game could be found.  So, they held a celebration - a solemn occasion to thank God for having made it this far.

They feasted, not upon turkey with all the fixin's, but upon 5 kernels of buckwheat per person.  Their normal daily ration was only three kernels of this grain!  And they thanked God they had that much.

It takes events like this, for each of us in our lives, to remember that whatever we have in this life is from God and we need to thank Him and rejoice for that abundance - no matter how little it is in appearance.

Of course, we know that later the indians found this little group of starving people and brought them food, taught them how to farm, how to find the local plants they knew nothing of and build homes.  Were it not for these indians, there never would have been the celebration of the fall harvest, with all of its bounty, Abraham Lincoln called upon America to remember and observe.

Of course, with the arrival of the second ship - our now established British religious protestors/Dutch survivors were to be overcome by racism, bigotry, superstition and take out these new policies on these same indians whom had saved the first group's lives.  The rest is just history - betrayals, murders, without end, on both sides.

So having learned this, I have across the almost 20 years of having children, started each Thanksgiving meal with five buckwheat kernels on each plate.  To teach my children the difference between thankfulness and bounty.  To remember a time when faith and thankfulness had real meaning.  And, to share with new friends whom would dine with us the story of long ago.

Each year the first purchase of the holiday season is a new bag of buckwheat grouts.  Yeah a pound of buckwheat is quite a few kernels.  Conversely, I actually like making buckwheat cereal for breakfast once or twice a year....

So, as we descend into the madness of this holiday - take a moment and pause to reflect upon how this tradition really started and what it really represented.  And maybe pick up some kernels at the local health store to share around the table tomorrow.