Remembering Thanksgiving Time

“I was just a little fellow,” my Uncle Fred said, as he recently described Thanksgivings he experienced at the home of his paternal grandparents, Ben and Lola Dill Crain.

Fred E. Crain, who lives in Greer, S.C., and was born in 1925, recalled his father and mother, Carl and Lillian, driving their car a short distance to Grandpa Ben’s white frame house on Thanksgiving Days. Fred and his older brother, Jesse Benjamin (J.B.), sat in the backseat. Ben Crain’s 52-acre farm in Greenville County, S.C., lay between Hwy. 253 and Groce Meadow Road, a few acres south of where those roads converge and the late Ralph Fowler’s store once stood.

“Grandma had cooked pies and stacked them on top of one another,” Fred said.

Ben and Lola had these children (listed in birth order and with spouses): Carl (Lillian Parker), Claude (Gertie Paige), Jay (Nell Willis), Jim (Gertrude Pearson), Theron (Veltra Hightower) and Hazel (Ernest Ramey).

Carl usually took his two beagles to the get-togethers. On Thanksgiving Day around 9:00 a.m. in those days, Ben and his five sons took shotguns and traipsed from the barn, which stood near the house and on the northern end of Ben’s property, across gray fields to hunt rabbits. Fred, J.B. and their cousins played and occasionally heard beagles barking and the sound of a shotgun, as the men crossed fields and walked the woods at the far end of Ben’s farm. The ladies prepared food while the men fellowshipped. The children played under pecan and cottonwood trees or near the barn and pasture or on the porch-with-banisters that wrapped around a large portion of two sides of Grandpa Ben’s house.

“There was a bunch of us boys and girls,” Fred said. “There was no electricity in our area at that time. I was about eight or ten when electricity came to our house.”

Fred’s grandmother prepared food ahead of time, but on Thanksgiving Day, she cooked a chicken pie to go with green beans, mashed potatoes, dressing, bread…cake, and pumpkin and potato pies.

“She’d make a big chicken pie laid out in a dishpan,” Fred said. He explained chicken dumplings and chicken pie: “To make dumplings, you roll up little balls of dough and drop them in boiling water with the chicken. For chicken pie, you roll flat pieces of dough and lay that across the chicken. There’d be some dumplings in the chicken pie, but there’s not as much chicken in dumplings as in chicken pie.”

Around noon, the men returned from hunting (Grandpa Ben often returned earlier, Fred said), and they’d usually have some rabbits, which they saved for later meals.
For the Thanksgiving dinner, the men gathered around a large table. Ben and Lola were Christians and members of Double Springs Baptist. (Ben’s daddy, John, had been a Baptist preacher.) Ben or one of the sons asked a blessing. The men and perhaps a few ladies ate first, but most of the women and children waited for “second shift.”

“Us kids would look through the dining room window,” Fred said. “It seemed like it took them a long time to eat. Children had to wait, back then. You might not get as much chicken pie as you wanted.”

Fred said about his early perception of Thanksgiving: “I knew it was a day of family getting together for a big dinner, a time of giving thanks to the Lord for all he’d done for you and for all the bounty.”

The first American Thanksgiving was celebrated in 1621, to honor the harvest reaped by the Plymouth Colony after a harsh winter, sources say. Governor William Bradford proclaimed a day of thanksgiving, and colonists invited local Wampanoag Indians. All 13 colonies didn’t observe Thanksgiving at the same time until October 1777. President George Washington declared the holiday in 1789. By the mid–1800s, many states observed a Thanksgiving holiday. The poet and editor Sarah J. Hale lobbied for a national Thanksgiving holiday and discussed the subject with President Abraham Lincoln. In 1863, in his Thanksgiving Proclamation, Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November a day of thanksgiving. In 1939, 1940, and 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt, wanting a longer Christmas shopping season, set Thanksgiving as the third Thursday in November. Controversy followed, and Congress passed a resolution in 1941, decreeing that
Thanksgiving fall on the fourth Thursday of November.

I thank God for America’s Thanksgiving Day holiday. May we all remember Psalm 136:1: “O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever.”