Thanksgiving Eats

This year we went with beef for our main Thanksgiving meal. Tenderloin, as it happens. We're rotating through the meats. Maybe ostrich next year.

Also on the menu were baked potatoes, stuffing from a box, a green salad, rolls, two kinds of olives (it isn't a Thanksgiving meal without olives), and apple pie to finish. St. Julian brand sparkling white grape juice was the main drink. The bottle says, "Proudly Produced and Bottled by St. Julian Wine Co. Inc. Paw Paw, Michigan 49079." and "Try all 10 flavors of St. Julian 100% sparkling fruit juice." Think globally, drink fruit juice locally (regionally, anyway).

Breakfast on Thanksgiving featured something we'd never had before, but which I can recommend, namely Trader Joe's brand pumpkin pancakes. Being a Trader Joe's item, there's plenty of description on the box, of which I'll only quote a little: "... the sweet subtle taste of pumpkin and aromatic blend of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg." The ingredient panel says the mix includes allspice and vanilla, too. I wouldn't eat them all the time, but they were good for a change of pace.

That Which We Have

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Posting will resume next Monday. Eat meat or a meat substitute, entertain yourself and dwell on what you have, rather than what you don't.

And remember those pious puritans at the near-mythic First Thanksgiving, who ate freshly killed animals; sang and danced and played games with Indians; and got good and drunk. They'd had a hard couple of years, after all, and probably were just glad to be alive and able to celebrate an English harvest festival (with new native elements) on these new shores.

Since I live at some distance from the rest of my family, it's been difficult for all of us to join together over the years. But we did so for Thanksgiving 2001, in Dallas.

Left to right: Yuriko, me, Lilly, my nephew Robert, brother Jay, mother Jo Ann, nephew Dees, brother Jim, Eleanor (Deb's mother) and sister-in-law Deb. My nephew Sam isn't in the picture because he took it, and Ann isn't in it because she hadn't been born yet, making her appearance about 14 months later.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

Today was nearly warmish, in the 50s F., unlike the deep chill blanketing Thanksgiving itself this year, so a thousand outdoor Christmas displays bloomed. Or so it seemed driving home after dark. It's probably an erroneous impression, but more wattage seems to be out there this year, at least in my neighborhood. If I drive through another couple of neighborhoods and get the same impression, that's enough material for a trend piece: Homes Lighting Up More in Hopes of Better '11. But I don't usually write that kind of article.

Not long ago I almost submitted this sentence for publication, regarding residential mortgage foreclosures and bunged up paperwork: "[Some] have suggested that the only relevant facts are that the borrower owes the money and has to pay it back," Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller... told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, stating what might be called the 'Milton Drysdale' mindset. AG Miller begged to differ."

But I changed it to "Montgomery Burns." For one thing (sigh) my editor might not have known who Mr. Drysdale is. But more importantly, I needed a touch of malice in the reference. Mr. Drysdale might have been Avarice incarnate, but otherwise didn't seem evil.

At its earliest, Thanksgiving can be on the 22nd; at its latest, the 28th. So Lilly's birthday won't ever fall on Thanksgiving, but it will always be pretty close. Her celebration was the weekend before the holiday this time around.

The day after Thanksgiving, I got a calendar in the mail from a Realtor I don't ever remember having any dealings with. It's a customized calendar advertising his services, of course, but I like his idiosyncratic choice of noteworthy days. In January, for example, there's the standard New Year's Day, MLK Jr. Day and even Epiphany, but there's also "Save the Eagles Day" (January 10), "Amelia Earhart Day" (January 11) and "Christa McAuliffe Day" (January 28). I wonder about that last one. It's all very well to remember Christa McAuliffe, but six other crew members died that day too.

Also included -- besides a sizable assortment of secular, Christian, Jewish and Islamic holidays -- are Chinese New Year, Income Taxes Due, V-E Day, Atlantic Hurricane Season Begins (June 1), D-Day, Juneteenth, V-J Day, National Aviation Day (August 19), Women's Equality Day (August 26), Stepfamily Day (September 16), International Day of Peace (September 21), Native American Day (September 23), Mother-in-Law Day (October 23) Wright Brothers Day (December 17) and Forefather's Day (December 21). I sense that this fellow might be a pilot, besides selling real estate.

When Black Friday Comes

Back after Thanksgiving. The prognosticators are calling for a touch of snow and deep chills around here, so it will be a good day to stay home.

"Got a Black Friday shopping strategy?" an article in the Chicago Tribune asked yesterday. "If not, you're likely to waste a lot of time and effort on the madcap day after Thanksgiving."

Madcap day, eh? Is Harold Lloyd going to hit the stores? But I do have a shopping strategy for "Black Friday." Namely, stay home. And I don't mean stay home to shop on line. I might waste some time, but it won't be in pursuit of more things to add to our large collection of things.

Also, we need to come up with a new name for the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday sounds like a stock market crash or other financial dislocation. In fact it refers to any number of events, some financial, including the popping of a gold bubble -- artificially inflated by Jay Gould and James Fisk -- on Friday, September 24, 1869.

"The economic fallout caused stock prices to fall 20%, export agricultural products (mainly grain crops) to plummet over 50%, several brokerages to go bankrupt, and severe disruption in the national economy for months," notes The New York Times regarding the 1869 Black Friday. Something to think about for those gold-starry-eyed folks who dream of a return to the gold standard.

The Feast Itself

Thanksgiving this year wasn't too frenetic, since only the four of us were at our house for the holiday. But some effort was needed to convert this 20-lb. raw bird...

... into a golden-brown bird ready to be eaten for Thanksgiving dinner, and again as part of the meal on Friday night, and again on Sunday as part of a soup, and again today as part of my lunch -- turkey leg, Henry VIII style, which I can do when no one else is around.

On Wednesday night, I decided that brining the turkey would be just the thing to prevent dry white meat on Thanksgiving, but it took a while to come up with a container large enough for the job. Finally I settled on a cooler we bought years ago to take on long trips, but which had actually seen few trips. Now it's found its calling as a vessel for saltwater and raw turkey.

The rest of the menu was almost too conventional for words: mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green salad, dinner rolls, pumpkin pie, sparkling white grape juice. I couldn't even be bothered to open a bottle of wine this year. I did open a jar of green olives, however. It's not Thanksgiving without olives on the table. No one else ate any.

We mashed our own potatoes but didn't put as much effort into the stuffing. It wasn't cooked inside the bird. That always seemed like too much trouble. Instead, Lilly made it from a box. But it's good. Stuffing mix has improved since the early days of such products, at least in this case. So I can recommend Trader Joe's Cornbread Stuffing Mix if it's stuffing you want, but aren't enough of a purist to want to go to the trouble of making it yourself.

Or Maybe Ostrich For Thanksgiving

Lilly has declared for turkey this year for the Thanksgiving meal. She's the only one in the house with a strong opinion, so we'll probably go along with that. Was last year ham? Or ostrich? I don't even remember. I told her she needed to help with the mashed potatoes if she wants those, and she said she'd mash them. It might be harder to persuade her to peel the things.

I've been noticing people outside putting up Christmas decorations lately. Since it has a way of snowing around here around December 1 -- and the weather wonks say that snow on Thanksgiving itself is a real possibility this year -- that's probably a good idea. Not as many people are lighting them yet, though a handful of eager homeowners are.

So I took the outdoor extension cord from the garage and attached it to the lights that I left clinging to the front-yard bushes since last year. They're composed of two small strings of lights, some years old, and it turned out they couldn't take the elements over so many months. They don't work any more. Or maybe they're just being true to their cheap made-in-China natures, and wouldn't have worked no matter where I stored them.

The Turkey Did Not Die in Vain

For Thanksgiving, we shared a feast with friends of ours, at their house out on the fringes of metro Chicago. They have two children, and so do we, so the occasion had the motion of four kids. Ours are older, so even Ann got to be something other than the smallest person around for a while. Lilly got a bit of small-child management experience, ahead of the day when someone might pay her to do so.

Pictured below is part of the feast, including the turkey, the star of the table, in a shot taken just before we ate. Look carefully and you'll see that the salad was adorned with fritos, instead of croutons. It was a nice, crunchy touch.

I noticed in the fat Wednesday paper ad section that JC Penney was opening its doors at 4 a.m. on Black Friday. Actually, I have a real estate journalist's respect for Penney's -- not too many years ago, Penney's was predicted to be the next big retailer to evaporate, along the lines of Montgomery Ward. But no. It has survived, even turned things around.

My respect for the retailer's business acumen doesn't extend to seeking out any of its stores at 4 a.m. on any morning. They're going to have to pay me to shop that early, and I didn't see that offered in any of the Penney's ads.

Item from the Past: St. Louis & Points in Between

December 2, 1999

Yuriko and Lilly were in Japan at the time I took this short trip to St. Louis and back.

I spent a pleasant Thanksgiving Day with Kevin’s family, which includes his parents and his older brother Tony. The next day I headed out for St. Louis. Aside from a few hours in the winter of 1990, just ahead of an ice storm that forced me to spend the night in Normal, Ill., I hadn’t spent any time here before.

On Saturday afternoon, after wandering through the art museum in Fair Park, I found myself on the riverfront, near the Arch. It’s an ugly riverfront, populated by riverboat casinos; a defunct riverboat restaurant (the Lt. Robert E. Lee, an ersatz steamboat dating from the ’60s — the 1960s, that is); “the world’s only floating McDonald’s”; and two cheesy tour boats, the Tom Sawyer and the Becky Thatcher.

That said, I like the Arch, and its museums underneath, but I’d been inside the Arch in 1990 and, especially considering the long lines, didn’t feel the need to go again. One of the tour boats was leaving in a few minutes, and I thought: Have I ever been on or in the Mississippi? Being beside it isn’t the same, nor crossing it by bridge, both of which I’d done a lot.

It would be silly, by my completely idiosyncratic way of thinking, to have been in or on a long list of bodies of water — Lake Baikal, the Indian Ocean, Hong Kong Harbor, just to name some of the more far away — and never the Mississippi. So I got on the Tom Sawyer.

It was one of the more drab tours I’ve ever been on. Some of the bridges weren’t bad, and a riverside 1910s-vintage power & light building had its Machine Age charms, but on the whole the Mississippi River near St. Louis is bleak this time of year, especially the Illinois side of the river. Even Hamburg Harbor and the Mouth of the Yangtze had more riverside sites.

On the drive down and on the way back, I also saw a few things. On the way south I stopped in Bloomington, Ill., I saw Justice David Davis’ (US Supreme Court, 1862-77) fine Victorian house. I had read that he organized delegates for Lincoln at the Wigwam in 1860, but not that he weighed 300 lbs. and then some. Most visibly, his size affected his choice of furniture, which tended to be sturdy.

I stopped in Lincoln, Ill., for lunch, and learned that the town was named for A. Lincoln several years before he became president — he did some legal work for the developers, it seems. En route out of town, I chanced by the Postville State House State Historic Site, a replica of the original courthouse for Logan County (Lincoln is the county seat). The actual 1830s courthouse was dismantled in the 1920s by Henry Ford and moved to his museum in Michigan.

The replica was good, however, and the volunteer tour guide, a woman of about 70, was really glad to see me, since I was the first visitor all day. She even showed me a cache of yellow documents hidden in one of the desks that she said the park administrators didn’t know about. (The ones I looked at seemed to be bills of sale from about 100 years ago). There were some even older documents on display, slipped into clear plastic protective covers so you could pick them up and read them. One I saw was an arrest warrant, dated 1847 if I remember correctly.

On the way back to the Chicago area, I stopped at the old capitol building of Illinois in Vandalia, from the 1830s. It was the original. After Vandalia lost out to Springfield as state capital, it was the county courthouse for the better part of a century. Not a bad little building. References to Lincoln were, of course, nearly as thick as in Springfield, but with some reason, since he was in the legislature that met in Vandalia, and in fact a voice for moving the capital.

Fred, Barney & Alec Guinness

No blogging till Sunday or so. Best to all for Thanksgiving.

Till then, some odds and ends. A local radio news report this morning claimed that today, in fact, is the busiest day of the year at O’Hare International Airport, in terms of the number of human beings who arrive, depart and transfer there. A madding, and probably maddening, crowd. I’ve flown on days like that. No thanks.

At least the skies are clear and the winds light, so there wouldn't have been the standard weather-delay shots on local TV news tonight of people sleeping at O’Hare boarding gates. Or the standard interviews of Families Who Just Want to Get Home for the Holiday, But Can’t. I sympathize, but what’s the news value in that?

Friday is Buy Nothing Day. I’m unpersuaded of some of the creators’ (a group called Adbusters) ecological premises, such as “the Earth could die because of the way Americans live,” or its sociological notions, namely that Americans are uniquely pathological in our consumer acquisitiveness. Just more successful, perhaps. Still, I like the idea of such a day, if only because of personal inclinations. My quixotic dream would be to buy all the nonperishable goods I ever needed at once, and then never have to buy any more of them again. With certain exceptions, of course, mainly books.

Netflix certainly doesn’t promote DVD acquisitiveness, since they go back by return post. Just send back Season 1, Vol. 1 of The Flintstones. I remember it as a Saturday morning cartoon, not a prime-time series. In fact, I think I was in my 20s before I realized that it had originally been in prime time, running longer than any other cartoon of the pre-Simpsons era.

The DVD colors are lush, which made me wonder why Hanna-Barbera bothered with color at all in 1960, when most TV shows were still black and white. Also, either Fred Flintstone mellowed slightly over time, or I misremember his character, but there were moments in these early episodes when he reminded me more of Moe Howard than Ralph Kramden. At one point he clonked Barney on the head despite discovering the he, Fred, had been mistaken about Barney taking something of his. He then told a puzzled Barney, “That’s for the next time you do something wrong.”

Kind Hearts and Coronets also went back recently. One day a few months ago, I decided I hadn’t seen nearly enough Ealing comedies, creations of a British studio of that name in the late 1940s and early ’50s, so I put several in my Netflix queue. Considering all the interruptions around here, it takes three or four sittings at least at work my way through a feature-length movie, but I've seen two so far. The Lavender Hill Mob came first, then Kind Hearts.

Droll comes to mind, though the word hardly does either of them justice, since they’re so much more. They’re comedy for grownups, for moviegoers that the filmmakers assumed were paying attention. It takes a deft touch to make movies about grand larceny and mass murder and yet leave the audience smiling.

Item from the Past: Thanksgiving 2001

This Thanksgiving was the first one with the whole immediate family together in many years — since sometime in the mid-70s, I think, when the family was considerably smaller. It took a long drive — a series of drives — to get there, but was worth it.

On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we headed out and made it to Rolla, Mo., for the first evening. The next day we drove southward from Springfield, Mo., gateway to Branson. Had lunch in Branson, a Chinese buffet with quantity, not quality on its side, and then took a drive down the main road, the hillbilly equivalent of the Strip in Las Vegas.

From there, southward on Arkansas 7, a fine drive, that is until it gets dark. Eventually we made it to the obscure Mena, Ark., for the next overnight. The only thing memorable about driving on darkened rural roads in Arkansas are the eerie, luminous chicken farms near the road. Rectangular, windowless buildings glow pale amber, with the light that keeps the chickens up and laying eggs all night oozing through the thin walls.

Enjoyed our visit with Jay and Deb from Monday to the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Monday was Lilly's fourth birthday, so we had a cake and candles and some presents for her. Throughout the week, she took up a lot of her cousin Robert’s time, playing with him. He’s the closest in age to her, but not too close — he turns 13 soon.

My mother and Jim came up for Thanksgiving itself. Besides Thanksgiving dinner at Jay's at a long table, other events included outings to the Dallas Zoo, the Dallas Museum of Art (just Y and me), and downtown Dallas, sometimes riding DART, a fine new train system. We ate other meals together, fooled around with Jay’s computer (an iMac), watched some videos (Chicken Run and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a fine Thanksgiving movie), and gabbed a lot about this and that.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we headed home via Ardmore, Okla., spending some time with my aunt and uncle (Sue, my mother’s younger sister, and her husband Ken). It was nice to see them, but it did make for a longer drive that day, much of it into the evening. We made it back to Rolla in time to go to bed at the same motel we stayed at on the way to Dallas, Zeno’s, a non-chain brand if there ever was one.

The only bit of sightseeing we did in Rolla was at the University of Missouri at Rolla, not far off the Interstate. I had read about a half-scale replica of Stonehenge there, so we looked into that. I wasn’t expecting anything as grand as the actual Stonehenge, which I saw in 1983.

This replica was built by the engineering department at the school, and it had the look of engineers about it: concrete and asphalt. According to the signs attached to it, it is aligned with the sky in the same way as the original, correcting for the fact that Missouri is somewhat south of Wiltshire, England. Lilly enjoyed playing around the stones, but Yuriko was completely unimpressed. I wasn’t all together impressed myself. Carhenge, now that’s a replica I need to see.