Recovered from Too Much Of A Good Thing

[yakalskovich]

Yesterday I spent in a corner, making exactly like a snake who'd just eaten a warthog. The Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday evening (one must adapt a bit to local conditions) at my cousin's place, by and for his American wife (she gets so homesick at Thanksgiving, and he sorta lends her his family - awwww!) was just as it was supposed to be: far too much. Peacock feathers were in evidence in a vase. They didn't get used after all, but I poked fun at it while I was still able to do any poking.

Later, I fell to thinking that America must have seemed like the legendary Land of Plenty to those early settlers who started the tradition of Thanksgiving. I mean, no measly, hard-shelled wheat, but huge, succulent corn cobs; gigantic turkeys so stupid a child could hunt them instead of the mean geese from back home; a small plant you just pull from the ground to harvest huge tubers that would fill you up easily; and then the pumpkins! Everything was oversized to those ex-British starvelings; small wonder they were grateful for that miraculous new country. And the natives were still friendly then as well; from all I hear that was the point of the whole exercise, right? What a wonderful place to come to, after being the lowest of the low back in England...

Comments

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Actually, as I understand it, it took a few years for the New Englanders to figure out how to live in the new land. They had trouble making the adjustment in food and climate at first: the average climate was several degrees colder than what they were used to, and this threw a lot of their plans out of whack. They also planted much later than they should have, so had a poor wheat crop. They were quite suspicious of maize, but there wasn't a lot left to eat at that point. Maize traditionally became a "lower class" food among the European groups living in North America, with the more delicate wheat reserved for their social superiors. This didn't stop people with proper taste buds from loving their corn on the cob, and it's now traditional to serve baskets of the stuff on the appropriate national holidays.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

And you're quite correct, it *is* the tradition to stuff yourself comatose on US Thanksgiving. We had a very small dinner, just the two of us, with ham (no turkey), stuffing, peas and carrots, and an acorn squash. Nevertheless, we *still* had to be moved around in wheelbarrows for a couple of hours. I don't know what it is about Thanksgiving, but perfectly normal portions just seem to triple themselves on the plate.