This is what we usually did at Thanksgiving:

I didn't do much but my mother did most of the work and my Grandmother. They cooked the dinner, they made everything at home, they would start three or four days ahead. They made pies. When my father was home for Thanksgiving we would have a huge turkey, must have been a twenty pounder, they cooked it in the old wood stove. The way they went about cooking it was pretty amazing, you had to keep the stove going all day, keep banking it, with coal every half hour or so to keep the oven to a certain temperature.

They used to make the stuffing and they would stuff the turkey with it, and they would sew the darn thing up with a needle and thread on both ends. Now they don't do it that way. They would put it in a big roasting pan and they would put stuffing around it too, they would cook it slowly all day and sometimes half the night. They would keep basting it. And they would make the gravy out of the juices, lot of fat in it. They would make the pies and the bread pudding before they made the turkey. They used to make cinnamon roles and us kids would munch on them. They always had nuts and fruits on the table all the time. I used to crack the nuts open with a nutcracker, especially walnuts, the only kind I ever cared for was walnuts.

On the side they always cooked a small duck or some kind of roast in case we got tired of eating turkey I guess, we didn't have any tinfoil those days. My Mom used to send us kids to the movies, me and my two sisters, to get us out of her hair while she was cooking, we would see old Western Movies or a Frankenstein movie. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Hop-a-long Cassidy were a big deal when I was a kid. You used to see two movies for a quarter, they were about an hour long each, and you got a big bag of popcorn for a dime. In between the movies they used to show a newsreel about what was going on in the second World War or about the President.

My brother and my sisters would come over for the lunch time meal. There wasn't a whole lot of left overs left over afterwards. And me and my sister Bea used to fight over the turkey legs, we always wanted the whole one, my Mother never wanted us to have them because they legs have a lot of bones in them, we wanted them because we thought they had the most meat on them I guess. I was closed to Bea than to most of my other brothers or sisters.

The minced pie with homemade cream on it was my favorite, it was made with real mince meat from a deer I guess, I think it was made from deer. I think it is raisins today a lot of it. And I used to have ribbon candy sometimes, my father was a candy eater.

We used to go down to Deering Oaks for ice-skating, with skates other people gave us because we never had money for them, my father had it hard in the winter, fisherman have it hard in the winter, the ones that don't save for it. My father was a good cook, my mother was too of course. My mother would tell us some stories about Thanksgiving, I can't remember what they was. About the pilgrims I imagine. She always told us about what was supposed to be her ancestor, Mary Dyer. I will write more about that later.

I liked the left overs, hot turkey sandwiches with the gravy on them.