Back when I was just a tyke, it always seemed that Thanksgiving Day preparations started at least two weeks before the fourth Thursday in November. That was when Mom would make her primary trip to the grocery store in order to begin to acquire all of the ingredients necessary for the holiday feast. (Emergency trips back to the grocery, of course, could and would occur right up to the time of the turkey carving.)
On the rare occasions when I'd be lucky enough to accompany her on this trip (usually she'd almost always cleverly coincided her grocery visit with a school day so she wasn't bothered by my brother and myself), the first thing that would go in the grocery cart would be the turkey. Mom always figured that if she put the heaviest lump in the cart first, she could then wedge her other acquisitions around it until she was no longer in danger from a major load shift when one of her kids ran the cart into something.
Every year, the grocery freezer was filled with turkeys; it held birds that ranged in size from those that were slightly larger than a chicken, (if you can imagine such a thing, in the eyes of an 8-year-old, as a small turkey) to huge gobblers that looked to be about the size of an Oldsmobile. I was always in favor of getting one that was slightly larger than my little brother, but Mom usually ended up selecting one that was significantly smaller.
Mom used an elaborate mathematical formula to determine the required turkey weight to the hungry guest ratio. It involved dividing the turkey's total weight by its estimated bone weight, then allowing the "leftovers" factor and figuring in how much the cat would eat (it loved turkey), and finally taking into account the phase of the moon. I always secretly had the feeling that an awful lot of her calculations had to do with how much she could lift into the cart.
Once the bird had been procured, the next item on the list was about five loaves of bread for the stuffing. One of my favorite attractions of Thanksgiving turkey has always been the dressing; without it, turkey was nothing more than a chicken on steroids.
A turkey with good dressing, though, with sage and celery and all of the other necessary spices (you can forget about oysters and some of the other more esoteric additions) is reason enough, by itself, for the total enjoyment of the Thanksgiving feast.
An item that could never be ignored was the cranberry purchase. Two full bags of fresh raw berries were required for Mom to cook up a large bowl of her cranberry sauce, which everybody ate. Then, she'd also make up a small dish of cranberry relish out of raw cranberries and orange peel zest that only she ate. Finally, there was a small plate with a quivering, can-shaped lump of cranberry-flavored gelatin on it that only my brother would eat.
After the small sack of potatoes and many cans of pumpkin-pie filling, corn, peas and all the other ingredients for the feast of the bountiful harvest were finally piled high on the grocery cart, it was carefully rolled to the checkout stand. There, as the purchases were being run up, Mom always decided that she'd forgotten at least one thing.
Eventually, the trunk of her old 1953 Dodge would be filled with bags of food and we'd wend our way home, only to begin the food preparations required for the annual tribute to overeating. When the time left until Thanksgiving Day got down to one day, things began to look a little frantic in the kitchen.
Pies somehow got made, the cranberries were finally washed and cooked, and all the place settings of the "good" dishes were finally located.
A memory I'll always have of my mother is the picture of her the night before Thanksgiving shredding loaves of bread into two large bowls as she prepared the turkey stuffing.
The next morning, she'd be up at 6 a.m. putting the final touches on the turkey as she shoved it into the oven. Then, she'd make sure that the plethora of accompanying dishes were all placed on the stove at their appointed time in order that the great feast would achieve liftoff together at the zero hour.
Mom probably never got told "thanks" nearly enough for all the work she'd do when the family was still living close enough together for Thanksgiving dinners. Now that we're scattered all across the country, it's the memory of Mom and those early holidays that I'm thankful for.[[In-content Ad]]
