Thanksgiving traditions evolve with local residents

Thanksgiving traditions evolve with local residents
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The core of the feast, the food, has not seen much variation for many generations in the USA, reflecting the autumn harvest: turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, stuffing, vegetables and a dessert.

                        

Thanksgiving traditions in the United States have had a long time to change and evolve since the holiday was first proclaimed by George Washington in 1789. With the passing of 220 years, foods and observances have been altered by expedience, popular culture, wartime shortages and simple economy.

After the first colonial Thanksgiving, observance was hit-or-miss until the middle of the Civil War when President Lincoln solidified it in the calendar, asking for a day of "Thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens," and planted it firmly on the last Thursday of November, where it remained with little variance until Congress set it on the fourth Thursday in 1942, ending some controversial tinkering by President Roosevelt in 1939, 40 and 41.

The core of the feast, the food, has not seen much variation for many generations in the USA, reflecting the autumn harvest: turkey, mashed potatoes with gravy, stuffing, vegetables and a dessert. But the families swirling around that feast and their customs have seen steady tweaks over time.

People tend to think of Thanksgiving as they remember it from personal memories of childhood gatherings and as a larger collective memory from television specials, popular art and advertising messages. But are families gathering in the 21st century in large numbers around a plump, roasted turkey in the same way they did in the 20th?

“That is a wonderful question,” said Jerry Marlowe of Dover, well known for both a passion for cooking and a newspaper column on the same topic. “There may be a bigger picture to look at, as I don’t know that people get together to cook big meals in general the way they did in years past. Of course that also speaks to the much greater number of options we have today. We simply don’t have to cook. And for the holidays you can just order Thanksgiving dinner and go pick it up or have it delivered and everyone gets to spend more time together outside the kitchen.”

Marlowe isn’t sure that’s an entirely good thing. “I remember spending every Sunday at my grandma’s, and there were always 15, 18 people or so. I have a lot of great memories from those Sundays, and it seems like we aren’t making those kinds of memories anymore. I also started to help in the kitchen at around age 7 or 8, and I wonder if kids are being exposed to cooking like that today,” he said.

Having someone else cook the bird, stuffing, potatoes and desserts is a fairly popular option for many families. Mabel Yoder at Dutch Valley Restaurant in Sugarcreek said not only is the restaurant open Thanksgiving Day for a full buffet turkey dinner, but also more than a hundred families have already ordered the whole meal to carry out. “It’s a very popular way to have Thanksgiving for many families,” she said.

A 21st-century Thanksgiving would naturally have some altered dinner table rules, some simply more relaxed and others brand new. As families may not have retained the heirloom sterling silverware and fewer people get serious instruction in formal table manners, such traditions may be dispensed with in many families. At the same time new manners come into play, and it’s likely everyone around the table must be reminded to leave their mobile phone turned off and elsewhere, an unimaginable scenario even two generations ago.

Perhaps the greatest changes in Thanksgiving traditions for most families come about with the loss of the older generation, who did all the organizing and planning.

“Our family used to gather for these huge, wonderful Thanksgiving dinners, which my grandfather and aunts put together and cooked,” said Amanda Daniels, head chef at Venue restaurant in New Philadelphia. “With their loss in recent years, we’ve pretty much stopped doing that altogether. Everyone kind of does their own thing.”

One thing that has remained a relative constant on Thanksgiving tables is the turkey itself. Turkey is a North American native hunted from the beginning of colonization, gaining greater traction after the formalization of the holiday in the 1860s.

Still, since the first Thanksgiving, celebrated among the earliest colonists, traditions have most certainly changed as the country has swelled to 327 million people, each bringing their own heritage and ethnic stamp to the day.


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