My First Thanksgiving

I had never celebrated, or even experienced Thanksgiving before I moved to Canada as a 10-year old girl. This was all new to me.

Of course, we read and were told about how the Indians helped the Pilgrims and all that, but I don’t remember just how much the American version compares to the Canadian one. Probably didn’t pay too much attention to it in school.

We’d never had a Thanksgiving meal, ever. I didn’t know quite what a turkey was, but saw it sold and advertised all over the place. So, to make sure we had turkey for Thanksgiving, I went to the store, clutching a dollar in change, and asked for five pounds of turkey. The butcher laughed and said I had to buy the whole bird. I walked home, shoulders down, tears in my eyes, to tell my mom that I guess we wouldn’t have turkey after all, since I didn’t have enough money to buy a whole one and the butcher laughed when I asked for a few pounds. She told me not to worry, we’d still manage. We did.

Never having cooked turkey before, my mom pored over cookbooks to see what to do. Then asked a neighbor. She filled the bird with cut up apples, carrots and some bread cubes. "It says I need to stuff the bird with bread." Then she put it into a baking pan, turned the oven on and … when it started getting real brown, she made a tent of tin foil and put that over the bird. When the time was up for the turkey to be finished, she took it out of the oven … and let it set. It ended up very dry. She’d cooked it at too high a temperature. The stuffing was OK, though.

She also made mashed potatoes, and had some cranberry sauce as well. Oh, and gravy, which was also largely experimental.

It was the dessert that gave her some real problems. She was bound and determined to make some pumpkin pie from scratch. SHE wasn’t going to buy one, besides, they were too expensive, she said as she looked for a recipe. The pie shell was made, patched up quite thoroughly, since her pie shells ended up like mine still do (I BUY the pie shell, frozen; she eventually learned to do that, too). Then there was the filling. Pumpkin soup. Well, it ended up as soup in a pie shell. "I can’t understand why this happened!" The dessert was served up with a spoon, and eaten with a spoon, and a fork for the shell.

The next year my great uncle Finnur took us out for Thanksgiving.