Fowl or Fair: Thanksgiving Weather Magic

Thanksgiving is fast approaching. It's the holiday most closely associated with New England, having its origin in the old Puritan tradition of celebrating thanksgiving days. Many of the foods we associate with the holiday, like cranberries, pumpkins, and turkey, are also foods indigenous to New England. 

This is a New England-centric blog, and I like to post something about Thanksgiving each year. So here, from 19th century Massachusetts, are some ways to predict on Thanksgiving what the weather will be during the upcoming winter:

Method #1 - Examine the feathers of your chickens. Do they seem particularly thick? If so, a hard winter is on its way.

Method #2 - Examine the breastbones of your chickens (after you have cooked and eaten them, sadly). Do they seem particularly light in color? If so, you can expect a lot of snow. If they are dark, you won't get much snow at all.

Method #3 - Look at the breastbone of your goose (again, after you have cooked and eaten them). Is it particularly dark? Yes? You can expect more rain than snow.

James Audubon, Wild Turkey, 1825

On the surface, method #1 appears to be the most "scientific." It seems logical that chickens will grow heavier feathers if a cold winter is coming. But do chickens' bodies somehow intuit what the weather will be like in the future, and then grow extra feathers in response to it? Do they actually grow heavier feathers if the next few months will be cold? I don't know think that's true. Chickens do tend to molt in the fall, but I don't think their feathers grown back heavier if the future weather will be cold. 

Method #2 seems more magical, and relies on similarity in color:  white breastbone = white snow. Method #3 also relies on magical color similarity, but doesn't predict if heavy snow is coming, only the proportion of rain to snow. I guess this is because of the goose's affinity for water? I suppose eating both chicken and goose would give you the most accurate forecast, telling you if you'll get more snow than rain, and also how heavy the snow will be.  

I found these methods of predicting the weather in Clifton Johnson's 1897 book What They Say in New England. Interestingly, there's no weather prognostication centered on turkey bones. Turkeys have long been the centerpiece of the Thanksgiving feast, but the magic associated with turkeys is focused on the wishbone. 

There are other forms of folk magic based on fowl. For example, Fanny Bergren's 1896 book Current Superstitions contains this unusual piece of advice from Winn, Maine:

"Swallow a chicken's heart whole, and the first man you kiss afterwards will be your future husband." 

Chicken hearts apparently had a lot of magical power, because elsewhere in the book Bergren notes the following:

"Swallow a chicken's heart whole and make a wish. It will come true." 

I don't think people eat a lot of chicken hearts these days, and even if you do I don't recommend swallowing them whole. You won't get married and your wish won't come true if you choke to death on a chicken heart. Chew your food!

I'm vegetarian, so I'm not eating any of these birds next week. I couldn't find any weather magic involving pumpkins, potatoes or Tofurkey, so let know if you try any of these divinations. I want to be prepared for the winter weather! 

The Tough Pie Crusts of Old New England

My family always eats the same meal every Thanksgiving, consisting of turkey, squash, potatoes, turnip, stuffing and cranberry sauce. Appetizers might vary, and Tony and I eat tofurkey, but the outline of the main meal remains the same. It's basically it's a lot of autumn vegetables boiled up and mashed. Delicious!

Thanksgiving has its roots in the old New England Puritan feast days, and it's surprising how closely my family's menu matches what people would have eaten three hundred years ago. I'm descended from relatively recent immigrants (I'm only second generation American on my father's side), but somehow this was the menu that my Quebecois grandmother learned to cook. 

Dessert traditionally consists of the same three pies: squash, mincemeat, and apple. Again, these are the pies that my grandmother always made. Why squash instead of pumpkin? I have no idea. Thank God that the One Pie company still makes canned squash. When they stop we might need to abandon the squash pie for pumpkin.

This year I'll be helping out by baking the squash and mincemeat pie. My mother always makes her pie crust with flour, oil and water. It makes a very delicate crust, but is hard to roll out. I make my crust with shortening, flour, and butter. It is not quite so flakey and delicate, but it is easier for me to handle. Now, do you want to hear about a really tough pie crust?

  
I can hear you asking, "What does all this have to do with New England folklore?"

Pie is very, very old form of food. There are recipes for pie-like dishes from ancient Rome and Egypt. In Medieval England, pies usually contained a mix of sweet and savory ingredients. Mix together some fish, some fowl, some game, some vegetables and some fruit and voila! A pie. Although the ingredients have changed over time, the basic concept has remained the same: food baked inside a pastry crust. 

The pie crusts of old were generally not the tender, flaky delights that we experience today. Whether it's butter, oil or shortening, fat is inexpensive to buy these days. In the past that was not the case, and many people made their pie crusts just from flour and water with no fat added. Fat adds tenderness to the pastry, so these fat-free crusts were quite tough.

You may think I exaggerate the toughness, but it was noted by several authors. In the 1500s this type of dough was called "strong dough." The English cookbook author Hannah Glasse included the following instructions in 1747's The Art of Cookery: "First make a good standing crust, let the Wall and Bottom be very thick..." If I'm not misinterpreting her, it sounds like the crust can stand up on it's own like Play-Doh. Yikes! 

The Swedish minister Israel Acrelius lived in Delaware during the middle of the 18th century, and experienced some tough pie crusts firsthand. He wrote in 1759 that the crust "of a house pie, in country places ... is not broken even if a wagon wheel goes over it." Acrelius was probably exaggerating a little, but you get the picture.

The pie crusts in Colonial New England were as tough as those in Delaware, if not tougher. Rye grows better in our climate than wheat, so rye flour was the most commonly used flour here. Have you ever baked with rye flour? It is much, much harder than wheat flour, so imagine making a fat-free rye flour pie crust. It was probably like edible ceramic.

A sturdy rye pie crust appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Oldtown Folks (1869), which is set in late 1700s Massachusetts. Two abandoned children find shelter for the night at the home of a friendly farmer. In the morning he sends them on their way with kindly words, and a pie:

Sol added to these words a minced pie, with a rye crust of peculiarly solid texture, adapted to resist any of the incidents of time and travel, which had been set out as part of his last night's supper. 

The crust was so hard that it could be carried without a pan. Now that's a strong crust.

The hard crust does explain one thing that has always puzzled me. Housewives in pre-Industrial New England made dozens and dozens of pies in the weeks leading up Thanksgiving, and a cook prided herself on the number and variety of pies she could produce. Although some of these pies were eaten at Thanksgiving, the majority were stored in the root cellar for the winter. I always wondered if people had dozens and dozens of pie pans in their houses, but apparently they didn't. They probably just turned the pie out of its baking pan and stuck it on the shelf. The crust was so hard it would hold its shape for months. I wonder how the flavor held up?

In his 1877 book Being A Boy, Massachusetts-born writer Charles Dudley Warner talks about how a boy could steal pie from the root cellar by hiding it under his coat: 

And yet this boy would have buttoned under his jacket an entire round pumpkin-pie. And the pie was so well made and so dry that it was not injured in the least, and it never hurt the boy's clothes a bit more than if it had been inside of him instead of outside; and this boy would retire to a secluded place and eat it with another boy, being never suspected because he was not in the cellar long enough to eat a pie, and he never appeared to have one about him.

So Warner is writing about a pie so solid and so dry that someone could stuff it in their shirt without it leaking. Wow! 

Traditional New England menus are great, but let's praise innovation where we can. I don't think anyone wants to go back to eating rock solid pie crust, no matter how portable it is.

*****

If you want to learn more about traditional New England pies, I recommend James Baker's Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday and Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking. I got most of my information from those two books, which are great! This post is an updated version of one I wrote on this topic way back in 2015. 

The Plymouth Vampire of 1807

Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and many people associate the holiday with Plymouth, Massachusetts. This is where the Pilgrims held a feast in 1621 that is sometimes said to be the "first Thanksgiving." That may not really be the case, but it's still a beloved American myth that is remembered every year around this time. 

But why does no one talk about the Plymouth vampire in November?

Most people don't associate vampires with Plymouth, but maybe they should. According to folklorist Michael Bell's excellent 2001 book Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England's Vampires, there was at least one documented case of vampire belief in Plymouth.

Note that I coyly wrote "documented case of vampire belief." There were no real vampires in New England, but according to Bell's research some people did believe they existed. The New England vampires were not like the Hollywood, pop-culture bloodsuckers we know today. Hollywood vampires kill their victims by drinking blood. New England vampires killed people with tuberculosis, and only killed members of their own families. 

Tuberculosis, or consumption as it was called in earlier centuries, is an infectious bacterial disease that affects the lungs. People with latent tuberculosis show no symptoms, but those with active tuberculosis are afflicted with violent (and often bloody) coughing, fever, and severe weight loss. About 50% of people with active tuberculosis die if the disease is not treated. Tuberculosis spreads when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or even speaks. It spreads easily in crowded conditions, like prisons, asylums, or small New England farm houses inhabited by large families. 

If one member of a family died from the disease, quite often other members would slowly waste away and die from it as well. People had many false ideas about what caused tuberculosis until Robert Koch identified mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1882. In some parts of New England, people believed it was caused by a dead person feeding off their living relatives. If one person in a family died from the disease and then others developed symptoms afterwards, the still-living relatives might blame the person who died. They thought the dead person was feeding off their living family members from the grave. 

Michael Bell documents 18 cases of New England vampirism in Food for the Dead, from 1793 to 1892. I assume there were more that went unrecorded. The Plymouth vampire case occurred in 1807, and was first mentioned in an 1822 Philadelphia newspaper article which was reprinted in a Plymouth newspaper. The author of the article writes about Plymouth as if it were a superstitious backwater:

In that almost insulated part of the State of Massachusetts, called Old Colony or Plymouth Colony, and particularly in a small village adjoining the shire town, there may be found relics of many old customs and superstitions which would be amusing, at least to the antiquary... 

There was, fifteen years ago, and is perhaps at this time, an opinion prevalent among the inhabitants of this town, that the body of a person who died of a consumption, was by some supernatural means, nourished in the grave of some one living living member of the family; and that during the life of this person, the body remained, in the grave, all the fullness and freshness of life and health...

The author goes on to explain that in 1807, of a Plymouth family of 14 children and two parents, only the mother and son had not died of tuberculosis - and they were both extremely ill with it. Some neighbors decided to help the family by digging up the grave of the daughter who had most recently died. They suspected she was feeding on her mother and brother. If the sister's corpse looked fresh and alive, this would confirm she was the one causing the illness. To stop her from feeding, they would turn her corpse face down in its coffin. This would prevent her from stealing the vitality of her brother and mother. 

At the appointed hour they attended in the burying yard, and having with much exertion removed the earth, they raised the coffin upon the ground; then, displacing the flat lid, they lifted the covering from her face, and discovered what they had had indeed anticipated, but dreaded to declare. Yes, I saw the visage of one who had long been the tenant of a silent grave, lit up with the brilliancy of youthful health. 

Sadly, the exhumation did not work. The shock of seeing his sister's corpse was too much for the surviving brother - he died two weeks later. The mother lived for a year before finally succumbing to the disease as well. 

A local physician wrote a rebuttal in the next issue of the Plymouth newspaper. He claimed no family of sixteen had died of tuberculosis, and also tried to argue that the people in Plymouth were not superstitious:

During a residence of nearly forty years in the district referred to, and favoured with opportunities of correct observation regarding this subject, the writer of this reply has not been made acquainted, with but one solitary instance of raising the body of the dead for the benefit of the living; and this was done purely in compliance with the caprice of a surviving sister...

You can see why I said he "tried to argue," because he states that at least once a body was exhumed to prevent it feeding on the living. But you know, only once.

That local physician might have found some comfort knowing that the vampire belief in Plymouth was not as extreme as it was in other parts of New England. The people in Plymouth believed simply turning the corpse face down would stop it from feeding. In other places, people believed the vampiric corpse's lungs and liver had to be burnt to ashes, and then ingested by their living relatives. Yes, you read that right. In order to prevent their vampiric relative from sucking their life out, people would eat or drink the ashes of their liver and lungs. 

It sounds almost unbelievable, but Bell has very good documentation in Food for the Dead. If you're interested in the topic I recommend his book highly. It would make interesting reading material before you get together to dine with your family at Thanksgiving.

*****

Thanksgiving is the start of the holiday shopping season. Might I suggest buying copies of my new book Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts for the people in your life? It's available wherever you buy books online. 

Bones, Apples, and Pie: Folk Magic for Thanksgiving

Since it's a holiday this week I thought I'd turn away from the usual witches and ghosts to write about something more light-hearted. But fear not! I'll get back to the spooky stuff next week. 

While browsing through some old books I came upon this familiar piece of folklore:

The forked bone just in front of the breastbone of a chicken or other fowl is known as the wishbone. If this bone chances to fall to you, preserve it and put it on the shelf behind the stove to dry. When properly seasoned you take hold of one end, let a friend take hold of the other, each make a wish, and then both pull. The wish of the one that has the top with his piece when it breaks will come true. (Clifton Johnson, What They Say in New England, 1896) 

Many of you have probably broken the wishbone and the tradition has very old roots. The Latin term for the wishbone is furcula, which apparently means 'little fork', and different types of folklore about this particular bone date back to at least the Middle Ages. Jeffrey Webb's American Myths, Legends, and Tall Tales (2016) claims they date back even further, to the ancient Etruscans who lived more than 2,000 years ago. It's a very intriguing bone, apparently. 

Mel McCuddin, Wishbone (2011), at the Art Spirit Gallery.

The specific tradition of getting your wish if you get the bigger piece of the bone is not ancient but is still quite old. Edward Armstrong's book The Folklore of Birds (1970) claims the practice of wishing upon the bone originated in the 1700s. So if you pull on the wishbone this year during your socially distanced celebration recognize that you are carrying on a centuries-old tradition, albeit under unusual circumstances.

Not everyone eats turkey so sadly not everyone can participate in the wishbone tradition. I did once buy a Tofurky that included a fake wishbone in the box but those fake bones aren't part of the Tofurky anymore. There is folklore about making pie, however, so even vegans can join in the holiday fun:

When a girl trims piecrust, and the trimming falls over her hand, it is a sign she is going to marry young (Clifton Johnson, What They Say in New England, 1896)

Nineteenth century folklore collections are full of omens that predict marriage. In a pre-liberated era, marriage loomed even larger in people's minds than it does today, and it particularly did for young women, who usually had limited career and life choices. Even the humble act of making pie could provide an indicator of one's marital future.

If you are making apple pie you have even more options for fortune-telling. One well-known tradition instructs a woman to peel an apple in one strip and then throw the peel over her shoulder. The peel will form the shape of a letter on the ground, and that letter will be the first initial of the man she will marry. Some accounts say you need to swing the peel around your head three times before throwing it down, so don't omit that crucial step.

A weirder piece of apple folklore comes from Maine. A young woman curious about her marital prospects should eat an apple at midnight while standing in front of a mirror. In one hand she should carry a lamp or candle for light. As she eats the apple she should recite the following incantation:

Whoever my true love may be

Come and eat this apple with me

Something about eating an apple at midnight and evoking an unknown lover to appear sounds a little spooky to me. I guess I wasn't able to resist the urge to write about spooky things after all. Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, even if you spend it alone this year.

*****

In addition to Clifton Johnson's book, I got material for this week's post from Fanny Bergen's book Current Superstitions (1896).

Was Jingle Bells Written for Thanksgiving?

Most people are familiar with the song "Over the River and Through the Wood." It's associated with Thanksgiving and the lyrics go like this:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow. 

Over the river, and through the wood,
to Grandfather's house away!
We would not stop for doll or top,
for 'tis Thanksgiving Day. 

Over the river, and through the wood—
oh, how the wind does blow!
It stings the toes and bites the nose
as over the ground we go.

There are more verses but you get the idea. I always associate this song with the 1973 TV special "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" since the kids sing it at the end of the show but the song actually dates back back to 1844. It was originally a poem composed by the Massachusetts author Lydia Marie Child. Child was born in Medford and her grandfather's house still stands in that city. (These days most people sing "to grandmother's house" rather than "grandfather's house.")

Currier and Ives, Home to Thanksgiving

The song is about riding a sleigh to Thanksgiving dinner (obviously). Although snow really isn't that common in Massachusetts in November sleigh rides (and snow in general) used to be major themes for Thanksgiving.

For example "Jingle Bells," another sleigh ride song, was also written for Thanksgiving. We now associate it with Christmas but that wasn't always the case. Interestingly, "Jingle Bells" was also written in Medford - James Pierpont supposedly wrote it at that town's Simpson Tavern in 1850. I guess Medford was the place to be for songwriters in the 19th century. (Thank you Snopes for the background on "Jingle Bells.") 

Snowy Thanksgiving were also common themes in the visual arts. For example one of Currier and Ives most popular prints was titled "Home to Thanksgiving," which shows guests arriving at a wintry New England farm.

So what's up with all this snowy Thanksgiving imagery? It doesn't snow that often in November in southern New England. Well, there are two answers. First, the climate was probably colder in the 19th century. The so-called Little Ice Age was just winding down when Child and Pierpont wrote their ditties but thing were still colder than they are today. Medford probably saw more November snow than it does now. 

There's also a cultural reason for the snow imagery. As I've mentioned in other posts, people in New England did not really celebrate Christmas widely until the 19th century. The Puritans who founded New England didn't celebrate the holiday because they didn't think there was a Biblical basis for it, and that tradition stuck in New England for many years. They did celebrate Thanksgiving though. Modern Christmas celebrations often feature snowy imagery in anticipation of winter, but Thanksgiving filled this role for our New England ancestors. 

Thanksgiving was the holiday that kicked off winter, not Christmas. Also Thanksgiving was not always celebrated in November. The date was announced by the local government and in some years Thanksgiving was celebrated in December. Historian James Baker notes that Thanksgiving could be celebrated as late as December 22. So sometimes Thanksgiving really was the start of winter. 

I got a lot of this information from James Bakers book Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday (2009). While explaining the snowy Thanksgiving imagery Baker also illuminated something about how we currently envision the holiday. Modern Thanksgiving imagery tends to focus on the harvest and on vibrant fall foliage but that's also a cultural creation. At least here in New England the harvest is over by late November and most of the trees have already lost their leaves. The leaves that do remain are brown and brittle. The natural world isn't looking very festive right now, which is probably why we brighten up Thanksgiving with thoughts of snowy sleigh rides or overflowing cornucopias. Whether Puritan or post-modernist we all need some holiday magic to get through the gloomy time of year. 

We Don't Celebrate Thanksgiving Because of The Pilgrims

Thanksgiving is the ultimate New England holiday. It has deep historical roots in this region and the menu, with its emphasis on turkey, pies, root vegetables, and cranberry sauce, draws upon traditional Yankee cookery. But what are the true origins of the holiday?

As children Americans are taught that we celebrate Thanksgiving because of the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims. Surprisingly that is not true. It is true that in the autumn of 1621 the Plymouth colonists held a feast in honor of their first successful harvest in Massachusetts. They feasted upon corn, wild fowl, and five deer that were brought to the feast by the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and ninety of his men. The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag partied for three straight days. I'm sure everyone had a big food hangover.

 

However, we don't celebrate Thanksgiving because of this harvest festival. We celebrate Thanksgiving because of Puritan religious culture. The Puritans, both in England and here in North America, did not celebrate many holidays. Christmas? No thanks. St. Valentine's Day? No way. Halloween? Definitely not! Unlike the Catholics and Anglicans they mainly celebrated what were known as 'providential holidays.' These were holidays announced to commemorate significant events in a given year. For example if things went poorly (plagues, droughts, military defeat) the Puritan leaders would announce a fast day. People were expected to abstain from eating, attend religious services and atone for their sins. 

On the other hand when things went well (military victory, end of a plague, etc.) a day of Thanksgiving would be announced. People would feast with their families, give thanks for their blessings, and (again) attend religious services. It's important to note that Thanksgiving days always occurred on weekdays, lasted for one day only, and involved religious services. It's also important to note that some years had multiple Fast days and Thanksgivings, depending on what was happening. Some years might have none at all. They were declared as needed.

Here are some examples. In 1630 the Puritans in Boston declared five fast days from April through June but only one Thanksgiving day on July 8. In Scituate there were 34 fast days from 1634 - 1653, but only nine Thanksgivings. Over time the practice of providential holidays gradually spread from Puritan New England to the other American colonies. John Hancock, leader of the Continental Congress, declared July 20, 1775 as a fast day for the thirteen colonies. In 1777 December 18 was declared a Thanksgiving day for all the colonies. When George Washington became the first president he proclaimed two Thanksgivings: November 11, 1789 and Thursday, February 19, 1795. After the Civil War Thanksgiving finally became an official, regularly occurring national holiday.

I know that's a lot of dates but the important thing is that Thanksgiving was celebrated at many times and for many different reasons. It didn't have one origin and it was not celebrated to commemorate the 1621 harvest celebration in Plymouth. The Pilgrims did not become linked with Thanksgiving in popular American culture until the early 1900s, several decades after the account of their 1621 feast was rediscovered by historians in 1820. 

 

Here's the really strange part: technically the 1621 harvest celebration was not even a day of Thanksgiving. It didn't involve any religious services and it lasted for a full three days rather than just one. It did not meet the criteria for a Puritan Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims never called it Thanksgiving, and other Puritans wouldn't have recognized it as such. It was just a harvest celebration. 

The Plymouth harvest celebration was initially declared the first Thanksgiving by Reverend Alexander Young in his 1841 book Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers. Reverend Young's claim slowly gained popularity and is now widely accepted as fact. I only learned otherwise when I read James Baker's Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday (2009). Baker was a historian at Plimoth Plantation who was puzzled that he couldn't find any sources connecting the Pilgrims to Thanksgiving earlier than the 19th century. When he started to research he realized why.

I love myths and legends, and even if we don't celebrate Thanksgiving because of the Pilgrims their story has still become an important part of the holiday. The aspirational image of the Pilgrims and Wampanoags feasting together is a model of something we should all strive for in our holiday celebration and our lives.

New England Pumpkin Lore: Cozy and A Little Creepy

October is definitely pumpkin season. The stores are full of pumpkin-flavored treats, jack-o-lanterns are appearing on my neighbors' porches, and someone recently motored across Boston Harbor in a giant pumpkin. Pumpkins are everywhere this month. There is some interesting New England lore about pumpkins, some of it homey and comforting, some of it kind of spooky. I guess that describes October too.

Pumpkins are of course native to the Americas. Historians say they were first cultivated in Central America and eventually adopted by the various American Indian groups that lived in New England. Samuel de Champlain, an early visitor to New England's shores, saw Algonquin Indians growing beans, maize and pumpkins along the banks of Maine's Saco River in the early 17th century. Pumpkin and squash were often included in dishes like succotash and were also dried for eating over the cold winter months.

When the Puritans colonized New England they adopted many local crops into their diet, including pumpkins. And because many of their English crops didn't grown well here, the early Puritans apparently ate a lot of pumpkin. A lot. It was seen as less desirable than traditional English foods, but Edward Johnson (1598 - 1672), the founder of Woburn, Massachusetts, wrote the following:

.. let no man make a jest at Pumpkins, for with this fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people to their good content, till Corne and Cattel were increased.

Take that, pumpkin haters!

The colonists atet pumpkin in variety of ways. Boiled and mashed pumpkin was a popular dish. Mashed pumpkin was also added to breads, while dried pumpkin was used to sweeten alcoholic drinks. In addition to mashing, another popular preparation was to hollow out a pumpkin and fill it with cream. The pumpkin would then be baked until the flesh became soft and the center custardy. It sounds delicious, and I did once try to make something like this. It didn't work too well, but I think I was using the wrong type of pumpkin.

Modern New Englanders are more familiar with pumpkin custard as the filling in pumpkin pie, not actually baked in a pumpkin. Surprisingly, the earliest pumpkin pie recipe from New England (written down in the 1760s by a wealthy Boston Tory family) calls for slices of fried pumpkin layered with apples and dried fruit in a pastry shell. It sounds good, but that's not what we would call pumpkin pie today. After the  Revolution the pumpkin custard pie that Americans still know and love become dominant.

So, there's the homey, cozy lore about pumpkins. They're also obviously associated with Halloween, which here in America is part harvest festival and part celebration of death and the macabre. Corn stalks, hay bales, apple cider, and cute little pumpkins are all part of the holiday's harvest aspect. Ghosts, witches, horror movies and scary carved pumpkins are part of Halloween's macabre side. Pumpkins can be cute or scary depending on how they are used.

Halloween was not really celebrated in New England until the late 1800s. It was one of those holidays, like Christmas, that the Puritans and their Yankee descendants avoided. But even though there was no Halloween, New Englanders still carved pumpkins in the fall months and lit them with candles. For example, local poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892) includes the following line in his 1850 poem "The Pumpkin":

Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!

Halloween wouldn't have been celebrated when Whittier was a boy, and in fact that poem celebrates Thanksgiving.

Nathaniel Hawthorne seems to be the first writer to use the term "jack-o-lantern" to describe a carved candle-lit pumpkin. He used it in his 1835 story "The Great Carbuncle." A carbuncle is a type of gemstone, and the titular one shines with a blinding light.

Hide it under thy cloak, say'st thou? Why, it will gleam through the holes, and make thee look like a jack-o'lantern!

Again, that was written well before Halloween would have been celebrated in New England. Hawthorne seemed to like jack-o-lanterns. In his 1852 story "Feathertop," a witch brings to life a scarecrow with a carved pumpkin for its head, but again there is no reference to Halloween in the story, which takes place in May.

I'm not quite sure how the jack-o-lantern became exclusively associated with Halloween, but somehow, as immigration changed New England and holidays like Halloween and Christmas became accepted, it took it's place as the reigning symbol of Halloween.

Before it was used to describe carved a pumpkin, the term jack-o-lantern denoted either a lantern-carrying nightwatchman or a will-o-the-wisp, one of those wandering orbs of light, perhaps of supernatural origin, that appear in forests and swamps to lead travelers astray. Will-o-the-wisps were often thought to be lights carried by malevolent fairies seeking to trick unwary humans. One of the rare pieces of English fairy lore from early New England mentions jack-o-lanterns in this sense of the word:

... Marblehead (Massachusetts) was a sort of compendium of all varieties of legend. For instance, the belief in the Pixies of Devonshire, the Bogles of Scotland, the Northern Jack o' Lantern was prevalent there; _ and my father has told me that he was often cautioned by the fishermen, just at twilight, to run home or the Bogles would be sure to seize him (William Wetmore Story, The Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 1851)

When you're out and about this Halloween, be careful as you walk towards that glowing pumpkin. Maybe it's been carved by friendly neighbors, but maybe it's a trick to lead you into the dark October night.

*****

Source for the jump rope rhyme: B.A. Botkin's Treasury of New England Folklore. The information about early pumpkin recipes and preparation comes from Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food. 

Trick Or Treat For Turkey? Masked Beggars At Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is full of traditions. Eating turkey, baking pies, watching football, putting on a costume and begging for food from neighbors...

What's that? You don't dress up and beg for food? Well, I suppose it's not a tradition anymore, but in the past it was common for children to dress up on Thanksgiving and go door to door, asking their neighbors for food.

Records of it can be found in the early 19th century, when the destitute would ask for food from their wealthier neighbors. Here is an account from Salem in the 1820s or 1830s:

For two days before Thanksgiving Day our back door was besieged by pensioners, who all came with the same whining request, "Please give me something for Thanksgiving." My mother always had ready a store of rice, flour, Indian meal and apples, which were dispensed to the crowd, while the more favored family retainers were given in addition tea, sugar, raisins, and oftentimes a pair of chickens or a turkey. Each one brought a stout cotton pillow case into which the measure of rice would be poured, and then a strong twine tied tightly round the outside to separate it from the flour, which came next, and so on to the extreme capacity of the pillow case (Caroline King Howard, When I Lived In Salem, 1822 - 1866, p.110).

The people doing the begging in this case were not children, but actual adults who either needed the food or worked for the King family and collected the food almost as a bonus. While her mother seems to have taken her role seriously, Caroline King Howard's use of the word "whining" doesn't sound very charitable. Some local children even thought it was funny to dress like they were poor and go begging too:

It used to be a great joke for the young people of those days to dress up in shabby old clothes, and on the night before Thanksgiving to go around as beggars, imposing upon their friends, and I remember the glee with which my friend Lucy used to describe her working upon her mother's sympathy to such a degree, by her eloquent and lifelike personation of a poor widow with two small children to support, that her pillow case was overbrimmed with good things... (Howard, When I Lived In Salem, 1822 - 1866, p.111)

A similar account is found in George Lunt's 1873 book Old New England Traits:

It was the practice of some of this class to knock at the doors of those thought to be better off, on the evening before, begging "something for Thanksgiving"; and, by way of a joke, the children of comfortable neighbors and friends would often array themselves in cast-off bizarre habiliments, and come in bands of three or four to the houses of those
whom they knew, preferring the same request... It was a queer fancy, thus to simulate poverty... (pp. 106 - 107)

So what's going on here? The answer partly lies in the agricultural cycle of Northern Europe and England, where the first New England colonists came from. In pre-modern Northern Europe, late fall and early winter was the time when there was the most food available. The crops would have been harvested, the beer brewed, and the animals slaughtered before winter. It was often the only time of year when fresh meat was available. However, this season's rich bounty was not evenly distributed. The wealthy usually had more than they could use, while their poor neighbors often didn't have enough.

Photo: Library of Congress

The tradition of seasonal begging, sometimes called mumming or masking, arose as a way to address this disparity. The poor, often wearing masks or outrageous costumes, would travel from house to house, asking for food and alcohol. Sometimes they would sing a song or perform a short play in return. This is where the tradition of Christmas caroling comes from. Although many carols are now religiously themed, some of the older carols are explicitly about begging for food. For example, these lyrics from "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" are pretty blunt:

Now bring us some figgy pudding

Now bring us some figgy pudding

Now bring us some figgy pudding

And a cup of good cheer

We won't go until we get some

We won't go until we get some

We won't go until we get some

So bring it right here

I'm listening to a version of this song right now, and it's being sung by a choir of charming children. It should really be sung by a group of drunken hungry peasants in a vaguely threatening manner.

But perhaps the children's choir is not totally inappropriate. According to Stephen Nissenbaum's excellent book The Battle for Christmas, children and teens often joined their poor neighbors in their masked begging. They might not have needed the food as much, but like the poor they were very low in the social hierarchy. So maybe a choir of drunk, threatening children would be the most authentic?

Photo: Library of Congress

The Puritans who colonized New England did not condone the celebration of Christmas, claiming there was nothing in the Bible to support the raucous parties and mumming found in England and Europe. In the New World, they wanted a society free from the drunken disorder associated with Christmas and banned its observance. Instead they instituted religious holidays like Thanksgiving, where people were supposed to reflect on the good things God had given them.

Give people an inch and they'll take a mile, the old aphorism says, and that's what happened with Thanksgiving. By the early 19th century, Thanksgiving celebrations lasted for several days and involved feasting, dances, games and heavy drinking. Thanksgiving was never as raucous as the old European Christmas celebrations, but it was the closest thing New England had.

Thanksgiving is now always held on the fourth Thursday of November, but that's a recent innovation. In the past it was sometimes celebrated as late as December. Thanksgiving was in many ways the Puritan replacement for Christmas, and the masked begging associated with a traditional English Christmas became attached to Thanksgiving instead.

Interestingly, in some places this tradition continued well into the 20th century, particularly among children. I don't think New England was one of them, and the photos used in this post are mostly from New York City, where children dressed up and begged until the 1950s. Interestingly, they often dressed like poor beggars, a practice so common that children were often organized into "Ragamuffin Parades." Pretending to be poor as a joke is not something that's approved of today, so it all seems kind of weird and maybe a little cruel to me. The tradition seemed to finally die when Halloween trick-or-treating became widespread.

I think this is a fascinating topic and I have lot of questions. How widespread was this practice in New England? The two examples I found are both from Massachusetts, and in his book Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday, historian James Baker claims it was only found on the North Shore. But if that's the case, how did the same practice end up in New York City?

I think there's a lot more that could be written about we ended up with the traditions that we have today. If by chance a stranger in a creepy mask knocks on your door this Thanksgiving, make sure you give them something nice to eat!

Old New England Pie Crust: Tough Recipes for Tough People

My mother has always made the same Thanksgiving menu, consisting of turkey, squash, potatoes, turnip, stuffing and cranberry sauce. Appetizers might vary, but the main meal always remains the same. It's the same menu that her mother made as well.

Thanksgiving has its roots in the old New England Puritan feast days, and it's surprising how closely my mother's menu matches what people would have eaten three hundred years ago. I'm descended from relatively recent immigrants, but somehow this was the menu that my Quebecois grandmother learned to cook.

Dessert always consists of the same three pies: squash, mincemeat, and apple. Again, these are the pies that my grandmother always made. Why squash instead of pumpkin? I have no idea. Thank God that the One Pie company still makes canned squash. When they stop we might need to abandon the squash pie for pumpkin.

This year I'll be helping out my mother by baking the squash pie. She always makes her pie crust with flour, oil and water. It makes a very delicate crust, but is hard to roll out. I make my crust with shortening, flour, and butter, which is easier for me to handle.

 
I can hear you asking, "What does all this have to do with New England folklore?"

Pies as a form of food are very, very old. There are recipes for pie like dishes from ancient Rome and Egypt. In Medieval England, pies usually contained a mix of sweet and savory ingredients. Mix together some fish, some fowl, some game, some vegetables and some fruit and voila! A pie. Although the ingredients have changed over time, the basic concept has remained the same: food baked inside a pastry crust.

The pie crusts of old were generally not the tender, flaky delights that we experience today. Whether as butter, oil or shortening, fat is inexpensive to buy these days. In the past that was not the case, and many people made their pie crusts just out of flour and water. Fat adds tenderness to the pastry, so these fat-free crusts were quite tough.

The pie crusts in Colonial New England were really, really tough. Rye grows better in our climate than wheat, so rye flour was the most commonly used flour. Rye flour is much harder than wheat flour, so imagine making a fat-free rye flour pie crust. It was probably like edible ceramic.

You may think I exaggerate the toughness, but it was noted by several authors. In the 1500s this type of dough was called "strong dough." The English cookbook author Hannah Glasse included the following instructions in 1747's The Art of Cookery: "First make a good standing crust, let the Wall and Bottom be very thick..." If I'm not misinterpreting her, it sounds like the crust can stand up on it's own.

The Swedish minister Israel Acrelius wrote in 1759 that the crust "of a house pie, in country places ... is not broken even if a wagon wheel goes over it." Acrelius was writing about Delaware, and probably exaggerating a little, but you get the picture.

Strong pie crusts also figure into Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Oldtown Folks (1869), which is set in late 1700s Massachusetts. Two abandoned children find shelter for the night at the home of a friendly farmer. In the morning he sends them on their way with kindly words:

Sol added to these words a minced pie, with a rye crust of peculiarly solid texture, adapted to resist any of the incidents of time and travel, which had been set out as part of his last night's supper. 

The crust was so hard that it could be carried without a pan. Now that's a strong crust.


The hard crust does explain one thing that has always puzzled me. Housewives in pre-Industrial New England made dozens and dozens of pies in the weeks leading up Thanksgiving, and a cook prided herself on the number and variety of pies she could produce. Although some of these pies were eaten at Thanksgiving, the majority were stored in the root cellar for the winter. I always wondered if people had dozens and dozens of pie pans in their houses, but apparently they didn't. They probably just turned the pie out of its baking pan and stuck it on the shelf. The crust was so hard it would hold its shape for months.

In his 1877 book Being A Boy, Massachusetts-born writer Charles Dudley Warner talks about how a boy could steal pie from the root cellar by hiding it under his coat:

And yet this boy would have buttoned under his jacket an entire round pumpkin-pie. And the pie was so well made and so dry that it was not injured in the least, and it never hurt the boy's clothes a bit more than if it had been inside of him instead of outside; and this boy would retire to a secluded place and eat it with another boy, being never suspected because he was not in the cellar long enough to eat a pie, and he never appeared to have one about him.

Traditional New England menus are great, but let's praise innovation where we can. I don't think anyone wants to go back to eating rock solid pie crust, no matter how portable it is.

*****

If you want to learn more about traditional New England pies, I recommend James Baker's Thanksgiving: The Biography of An American Holiday and Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking. I got most of my information from those two books, which are great!

Squash Pie and Burning Barrels for Thanksgiving

This week I'm making a squash pie for Thanksgiving. That's right, squash pie, not pumpkin.

Every year my mother makes three pies at Thanksgiving: apple, squash, and mincemeat. (I volunteered to help make the squash pie this year.) Her mother made the same three pies as well.

Squash pie is kind of old-fashioned. It's made just like pumpkin pie, but using canned squash. I think only Maine's One-Pie company still produces canned squash, and it can be hard to find in some areas. I suppose that if One Pie ever goes out of business my family's tradition of squash pie will end.

I often think of holiday traditions as ancient and timeless, but that's not true. Traditions come and go and the holidays change through time. For example, Thanksgiving (the archetypal New England holiday) used to be celebrated with dances:

... some gather in a neighbor's dwelling, and find rich jokes over the crackling of hickory nuts and eating of the good dame's preserves; some patronize the ball in my landlord's spacious chamber, and seek "no sleep till morn" in the excitement of the dance... (John Carver, Sketches of New England, 1842)

Sleigh rides were also quite popular in the 19th century, but of course Thanksgiving often occurred in December then, rather than November.

A giant bonfire made of barrels was once part of the Thanksgiving festivities in Norwich, Connecticut. Originally the bonfire was a simple (if large) pyramid of empty barrels stacked high. Large crowds would gather on Thanksgiving night to watch the fire, and over time the bonfire became more elaborate. Two pyramids of barrels, one on each side of the Thames River, replaced the original single pyramid, and tar-filled barrels were strong on a rope between them across the water. The whole structure was lit on fire, and people crowded onto the nearby hillsides to watch the fiery spectacle. (This information is from David E. Phillips's Legendary Connecticut, 1992).

When I first learned about the Norwich barrel bonfires I thought they were just a nineteenth century thing, but according to this article the last one took place in the 1980s. Unlike the earlier giant bonfires, these more recent ones were sponsored by different neighborhoods. But eventually the barrel-burning tradition faded away in Norwich. Some writers say it was because the barrel fires were too dangerous - at least one person died because of them - but others say it's just because wooden barrels are harder to find now.

I'm sure barrel-burnings were a crucial part of Thanksgiving to some people in Norwich, just like squash pie is a crucial part of the holiday for my family. But someday that squash pie might be replaced by pumpkin, and I guess I'll just have to accept that change when it comes.

The History of Cranberry Sauce

In the year 1638, the Englishman John Josselyn sailed from his home country to visit a strange and wild land called New England. He stayed for just over a year, and enjoyed it so much he returned again in the 1660s for another visit.

Josselyn wrote several books describing what he saw in New England, including strange animals, Native American customs, and unusual plants. Among those plants was the following:

Cran Berry or Bear Berry, because bears use much to feed upon them, is a small trailing plant that grows in salt marshes that are overgrown with moss. The tender branches (which are reddish) run out in great length, lying flat on the ground, where at distances, they take root, over-spreading sometimes half a score acres, sometimes in small patches of about a rod or the like...

The berries, hanging by a small root stalk, no bigger than a hair; at first they are of a pale yellow color, afterwards red and as big as a cherry; some perfectly round, others oval, all of them hollow, of a sour astringent taste. They are are ripe in August and September...

The Indians and English use them much, boiling them with sugar for sauce to eat with their meat. And it is a delicate sauce, especially for roasted mutton. Some make tarts with them as with goose berries. (John Josselyn, New-England's Rarities Discovered, 1671)

And that, as far as I can tell, is the first written mention of cranberry sauce*. Somewhere between 1638 and the 1660s people were already using cranberries, a native North American fruit, to make what is now a classic Thanksgiving dish.


 Before the English came the local Indians used cranberries in a dish called pemmican, which was made of dried meat, berries, and animal fat. When the English arrived they used cranberries in traditional British dishes. Cranberry sauce was the New England version of a traditional English barberry conserve, barberry being a sour fruit that grew in Europe. Here's a recipe from 1597:

To make a conserve of barberrries

Take your barberries and pick the clear, and set them over a soft fire, and put to them rosewater as much as you think good. Then, when you think it be sod enough, strain that, and then seethe it again, and to every pound of barberries, one pound of sugar, and meat your conserve. (Thomas Dawson, Second Part of the Good Housewives Jewel, 1597, quoted in James Baker's Thanksgiving. The Biography of an American Holiday, 2009)

At first that seemed like a pretty high sugar to berry ratio to me, but looking at some modern cranberry sauce recipes online I found it's really not. Most modern recipes call for one cup of sugar per twelve ounce bag of berries. A pound of sugar is just under two cups, and a pound is sixteen ounces. So really this old barberry conserve is a little sweeter than modern cranberry sauce, but not much. Of course, most people don't put meat in their cranberry sauce these days.

It took almost 200 years for the first cranberry sauce recipe to appear, although other recipes with cranberries appear in a lot of the earlier American cookbooks. America's first published cookbook, American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons, includes a recipe for a cranberry tart, but no cranberry sauce. In The American Frugal Housewife (1833), author Lydia Marie Child includes cranberry pie and cranberry pudding recipes, but again no recipes for cranberry sauce. (Child also discusses using cranberries to remove warts, which I don't recommend fort Thanksgiving dinner.)

Cranberry sauce recipes don't begin to appear in cookbooks in the middle 1800s. I suspect there is a simple reason the earlier cookbooks don't contain cranberry sauce recipes - it's just so simple to make. Boil berries with sugar and water. That's it! I suppose it would have been like including a recipe for making a peanut butter and sandwich.

*If you know a verifiably earlier reference to cranberry sauce, or an earlier recipe, please let me know. I've seen some references on Wikipedia to a "Pilgrim cookbook" from 1663, but I can't find that actual cookbook anywhere. Wikipedia also misquotes Josselyn's book, claiming he called it "sauce for Pilgrims," which is not the case, so I'm feeling a little skeptical about Wikipedia and cranberry history.

America's Oldest Pumpkin Pie Recipe?

You often hear the saying "As American as apple pie," but as Thanksgiving draws near pumpkin pie looms ever larger in the national consciousness.

Pumpkins originated here in North America, but even before our continent was permanently colonized by Europeans they brought pumpkins back to the Old World and started baking pies. These European pumpkin pies were quite different from the ones we consume today. Recipes from seventeenth century England involve slicing and frying the pumpkin in a batter of eggs and sugar, and then layering the slices with apples and currants in a pastry shell. Your guests would be very confused if you served that to them this Thanksgiving.

Pumpkin pie went out of style in England, and at first it seemed it would do the same in New England. In 1650, Edward Johnson wrote happily in his book Wonder Working Providence of Sions Savior in New England that colonists were making more pies from traditional European fruits like apples and quinces instead of "their former Pumpkin Pies." For Edward Johnson pumpkin pie was a low-class, tacky dessert and it was good that it was slowly disappearing.

Luckily for us it didn't. Pumpkins grow well in New England and were a dependable food source for the English. A ballad called "New England's Annoyances" praises the humble gourd:

If flesh meat be wanting to fill up our dish, 

We have carrets and pumpkins and turnips and fish...

...Instead of pottage and puddings and custards and pies,

Our pumkins and parsnips are common supplies;

We have pumkin at morning and pumkin at noon,

If it was not for pumkin we should be undoon.

The earliest known American pumpkin pie recipe is one that was written down by Anne Gibbons Gardiner of Boston in the 1700s. It was very similar to the old English recipes, and involved layering sliced pumpkin with apples. The Gardiners sympathized with the British during the Revolution and fled to England, taking their pie recipe with them. They later returned to New England and lived in Maine, but Mrs. Gardiner's recipes weren't published until the 1930s.

The first published pumpkin pie recipes appears in Amelia Simmons's book American Cookery, which was printed in Connecticut in 1796. Her two recipes are very similar to modern ones. The old-fashioned layered pumpkin slices have been replaced by the pumpkin custard we're familiar with today:

No. 1. One quart (pompkin) stewed and strained, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg, ginger, laid into paste No. 7 or 3, and with a dough spur, cross and chequer, and baked in dishes three quarters of an hour.

No. 2. One quart of milk, 1 pint pompkin, 4 eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger in a crust, bake 1 hour.

The big difference between her recipes and contemporary ones is that she tops the pie with a lattice crust. Most modern modern cooks omit a top crust. Still, I think you could follow her recipe and safely serve it to your guests this Thanksgiving for a historically authentic yet delicious dessert.

I found this information in James Baker's Thanksgving. The Biography of an American Holiday and Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald's America's Founding Food. The Story of New England Cooking. 

Boiled Cider Pie

Thanksgiving is one of New England's great gifts to American culture. Originating in Puritan feast days, the holiday gradually spread across the country bringing turkey, stuffing and pies with it.

Modern Americans eat a wide variety of pies on Thanksgiving, many of them unrelated to the holiday's origins in New England. Let's face it, the Puritans weren't eating coconut cream or key lime pie, so a few years ago I wrote about the obscure pies of old New England, like squash pie, mincemeat pie, and boiled cider pie.

At the time I had never eaten or made a boiled cider pie, but this year in honor of Thanksgiving I decided to give it a try. I was really happy with the results.

Boiled cider is not something you see in many 21st century pantries. Its use has been recorded as early as the 1670s in western Massachusetts, and it was a common sweetener in the Colonial era. It makes sense. Molasses and sugar were expensive imports, but apple cider was locally produced and inexpensive. You can still buy boiled cider at country stores in northern New England and online from the King Arthur store, but I decided to make my own using instructions from an old Yankee Magazine cookbook.

It was easy, but took a long time. I poured a gallon of cider into a large pot, and then boiled it at high heat until it was reduced to a single cup of gelatinous goop. Even though I boiled it over high heat it still took around two and a half hours! I didn't need to stir it much until the end when it was really getting thick.

Boiling, boiling, boiling...

... Still boiling more than two hours later!

What I had after two hours and thirty minutes of boiling.

After it cooks down to a cup, let it cool. I put it in the refrigerator but I don't know if this was the smartest move. The boiled cider became almost completely solid which made it harder to use in the recipe. I would recommend letting it cool on the counter or maybe not boiling it down as much. The cider that is sold commercially is more syrupy and less goopy than what I made.

There are a few boiled cider pies floating around on the web, but I liked this one from Wood's Cider Mill in Vermont, which has been owned by the same family for seven generations. They make and sell boiled cider so I figured they must know what they're talking about. Also, their recipe is simple and really focuses on the boiled cider as the main ingredient. I baked the pie for an hour, which is 10 minutes longer than the recipe instructs, but that could just be my stove.

Sugar, eggs, milk, a little flour, and boiled cider. Mix it well because that boiled cider is thick!

It's looking a little  like pumpkin pie, but don't be fooled.

Boiled cider pie - sweet, tart, goopy and historic!

The pie came out great. Its consistency is similar to a custard or pumpkin pie, and although it's really sweet the sweetness is cut by the cider's tartness. If you like cider, sugar and pie crust (and who doesn't?) you will like this pie. It's like autumn, New England, and three centuries of history all in one dessert.

Have a great Thanksgiving!

A snowy Thanksgiving mystery

The image above is a vintage Currier and Ives print from the 1860s. It shows a quintessential New England scene: a snowy day, an old farm house, a horse drawn sleigh. It evokes a wonderful feeling of Christmas, doesn't it?

Then why is this print titled "Home for Thanksgiving?"

A similar question is raised by Lydia Marie Child's "Over the River and Through the Woods", which has the following lyrics:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.

The song was originally published as a poem with the title "A Boy's Thanksgiving Day". Why are people riding a sleigh on Thanksgiving? Some parts of New England might have snow for the holiday, but November usually isn't really a big snow month around here.

Even factoring in global climate change, our Novembers are probably not that much different from Novembers in the 19th century. According to James W. Baker's Thanksgiving: the Biography of an American Holiday, something else explains all this snowy Thanksgiving imagery.

Before Thanksgiving became a national holiday permanently celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the November, its date was determined by local town, city, and state governments. The date varied quite a git. Some years it was celebrated in late November, but in other years it could be celebrated as late as December 22nd. Christmas was not celebrated in New England until late in the 19th century, so there was no conflict in having Thanksgiving so late in the year.

In fact, as reader Wicked Yankee presciently mentioned in a recent comment, Thanksgiving effectively took the place of Christmas in Puritan New England. And just as we associate snow with Christmas, the Puritans associated it with Thanksgiving. If Bing Crosby had been a Puritan, he would have sung "I'm dreaming of a white Thanksgiving." The Currier and Ives print and Lydia Marie Child's poem reflect this earlier ideal of the snowy white Thanksgiving.

Mystery solved. I hope you all have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, with or without snow!

The Turkey Shoot

Turkey has long been the focus of Thanksgiving feasts in New England. In the colonial era, both domestic turkeys and their wild cousins wound up on the Thanksgiving table.

Unfortunately for them, wild turkeys aren't the smartest birds. The famous naturalist James Audubon relates how he once killed three turkeys with one shotgun blast. Rather than fly away to save their lives, the other members of the flock strutted around their dead friends. Clearly they aren't too bright.


Given their small brains and our ancestors' propensity to shoot anything that moved, the wild turkey became nearly extinct in New England by the middle of the 19th century. One author claimed at the time that the last wild turkey in Massachusetts was killed on Mount Tom in 1847. Its taxidermied corpse was displayed at the Yale museum.

A turkey shoot, by John Whetten Ehninger.

There were still abundant domestic turkeys available in the 19th century, but some men in New England preferred shooting their Thanksgiving dinner. This led to a somewhat barbaric practice: the turkey shoot.

A farmer would tie one of his turkeys to a fence post or a tree, and then gather together a group of men. Each man was charged a fee, and whoever shot the turkey was allowed to take it home for dinner. It was not as easy as it sounds, since guns at that time were not particularly accurate, and the distance between shooters and turkey was around 300 feet. As James Baker writes in his book Thanksgiving: the Biography of an American Holiday,

"As in shooting galleries at modern carnivals, it took luck and skill to hit one's target, considering the distance, the movement of the bird, the firearms of the day, and the amount of alcohol consumed."

Happily, times have changed. Wild turkeys have made a comeback in New England and most turkey shoots now feature paper targets. For a Thanksgiving totally free of cruelty, I would suggest tofurkey. It may not taste exactly like turkey but it will be easier to shoot if you tie it to a tree.

When Was the First Thanksgiving?

When I was a kid, I was taught that the Pilgrims had the first Thanskgiving in 1621 to celebrate a successful harvest. They invited the local Wampanoag, who had helped them adapt to their new homeland, and everyone had a great time. We've been celebrating Thanksgiving ever since.

Apparently the history of Thanksgiving is a little more complicated. My friend Robert Sullivan gave me a copy of James W. Baker's Thanksgiving: the Biography of An American Holiday, and what I read was very illuminating. James Baker was the director of research at Plimoth Plantation, so I think he knows what he's talking about. It seems the roots of Thankgiving go back farther than Plymouth, all the way back to England.

Was this the first Thanksgiving?

According to Baker, the Puritans in England regularly declared fast days, when the people atoned for their sins, and days of thanksgiving, when they celebrated God's providence. Fast days were declared when there was trouble in the world - plagues, wars, droughts, etc. Thanksgiving days were declared when things were going well - victory in war, a bountiful harvest, the death of an unpopular dictator, etc. Fasts and thanksgiving days were not calendrical holidays celebrated annually on particular dates, like we have today, but were announced by the clergy based on world or community events, and were known as "providential holidays." Some years could have several of both, some years could have none.

Only clergy were allowed to announce fast days and thankgiving days, since both involved lengthy church services. On fast days, people abstained from all food. On thanksgiving days, the church service was followed by feasting.

After the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, the first holiday the clergy announced was a day of fasting in July of 1623, during a serious drought. As the Puritans established more settlements in New England they declared other providential holidays, to commemorate things like the end of the Pequot War, or an unusually large catch of fish.

As the colonies became larger, local governments took on the job of declaring annual fast days and thanksgiving days. A fast day was usually celebrated every spring (conveniently when there was not much food available), and a day of thanks was celebrated annually in late November or December, when there was plenty of food available after the harvest and livestock slaughter.

So where does the Pilgrim and Wampanoag harvest celebration of 1621 fit into this history? Interestingly, although the Pilgrims were quite thankful for the harvest, that celebration was not declared an official day of thanks by the clergy. In his journal, Governor Bradford makes note of the feasting, but does not call it a thanksgiving holiday. So technically, that celebration in 1621 was not really the first Thanksgiving. It was, however, a great party.

I think William DeLoss Love, a 19th century historian, sums it up best:

"It was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts."

Over the River and Through the Woods to Medford!

I'm a big fan of all the Charlie Brown holiday specials, but over the years my appreciation for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving has really grown. I used to consider it the least significant of the Peanuts specials, but now it might be my favorite.

It also has a New England connection. As the show ends, after all the complications and emotional traumas have been resolved, the kids ride off to Charlie Brown's grandmother's house singing "Over the River and Through the Woods." Yay! A happy ending. (Then Woodstock and Snoopy eat turkey, which makes Tony wonder if Woodstock is a cannibal of some kind. I think the turkey is just a symbol of restored social order.)

The happy ending wouldn't be possible without Lydia Marie Child (1802- 1880) a novelist, abolitionist and cookbook author who was a native of Medford, Massachusetts. She wrote "Over the River..." for an 1844 book called Flowers for Children Volume II. The poem was originally titled "A Boy's Thanksgiving." You can see the full poem here.

The poem recalls Child's own trip to see her grandfather who lived near the Mystic River in Medford. His house still stands on South Street and is now owned by Tufts.

Grandfather's house image from this Tufts blog.

The tune for "Over the River and Through the Woods" apparently is from an old French folk tune but I'm not sure how it got connected to Child's poem.

These days some people are confused by the lyrics because they sound so wintry. Sleigh rides in November? Snow in Medford for Thanksgiving? Maybe she wrote it remembering one particularly cold year, or maybe the climate was different then. Global warming strikes again!

Because the lyrics are about snow, the song is sometimes associated with Christmas. I also think most people change the word's "grandfather's house" to "grandmother's house." We may be suffering from global warming but at least we have more equality between the sexes.

Have a great Thanksgiving. And as Charlie Brown says,"There's just one problem. My grandmother lives in a condominium!"