Thanksgiving in Maine

Guest of honor at the Thanksgiving feast
Guest of honor at the Thanksgiving feast

Although it feels more like Christmas, complete with blustery winds and snow falling,  we’re just a little more than a day away from Thanksgiving. It’s my personal favorite holiday, largely because there is no agenda other than family, friends, and good things to eat.

New Englanders tend to stick to a traditional menu, parts of which–squash, for example–date back to that first Thanksgiving long ago. There was wild turkey as well, although it’s likely that the centerpiece of the feast was venison.  With plenty of root vegetables and perhaps an early version of cranberry sauce (did you know that the Pilgrims called the berries “crane-berries” because they thought the flowering plant looked like a crane?) perhaps that first Thanksgiving might have looked quite familiar to us.  There were guests, too,  as the Pilgrims welcomed the friendly Wampanoag Native Americans who had helped them so much during those first few years.

Here on my small Maine island, we’re bundling up and getting ready to welcome company tomorrow.  I hope you, too, have a great day on Thursday with friends and family. Christmas shopping can wait, no matter what the ads say……enjoy the moment!