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Give thanks

This week many of us will be celebrating Thanksgiving with friends and family.

We will gather and indulge in a feast of turkey and other staples of the holiday season and perhaps enjoy a slice of pie or two or other indulgent desserts.

Many will look forward to watching football or the Macy’s Parade, or be eagerly anticipating hitting the stores early to go shopping for Black Friday sales.

Thanksgiving is a time to celebrate and be grateful for what we have as part of a tradition that goes back hundreds of years.

The idea of Thanksgiving goes back well before the Pilgrims made it to America and can be traced to harvest festivals and religious observations and similarly these observances were held in American as early as 1607 in Virginia.

But it was the celebration in Plymouth that has become woven into the tapestry of our country.

With the help of the Native Americans, particularly Squanto, who taught settlers how to catch eel and plant corn, in 1621 the Pilgrims had their first successful harvest and celebrated with a three day feast.

But the idea did not become the tradition we now know for some time.

The holiday was celebrated off and on from 1789 onward, when George Washington issued a proclamation at the request of congress.

It was not until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln that the modern holiday really came to be.

In 1863, during the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed a national day for giving thanks.

History tells us it was a letter from writer and editor Sarah Josepha Buell Hale that caught Lincoln’s attention.

Hale had been working for many years, writing to five presidents to encourage the establishment of a national day of thanksgiving.

With roots in Plymouth, the day was celebrated in New England, but every state set its own date and the day was largely unrecognized in the southern part of the country at that time.

Establishing this day, was seen as a unifying event in the midst of the Civil War.

From there, the holiday and its traditions began to truly take shape, with regional variations, but with every president since Lincoln affirming the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

This changed with Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1939, declared the fourth, rather than the last Thursday of November, which had five weeks that year, as Thanksgiving Day.

Facing the Great Depression, it has been reported, Roosevelt, believed this move would give merchants more time to sell Christmas goods at a time when the idea of promoting Christmas merchandise before Thanksgiving was considered to be in poor taste.

This created divisions among political lines and in 1941 congress introduced legislation fixing the date to the last Thursday of the month, but the senate introduced an amendment calling for the celebration to be on the fourth Thursday, which generally is the last Thursday of the month.

This is a long and at time tangled history to get to the modern celebration, but no matter its roots, it is important to remember the root words, thanks and giving, and to take a few moments to give thanks for those things we are fortunate enough to have and consider those who are not as fortunate and give something back.

As the start of the holiday season, a time when many of us are looking to support charitable organizations, this is a good time to consider a donation to a local food pantry or church organization that helps feed those who struggle with food insecurity and pass along, even in some small way, the blessing we are fortunate enough to have to others.

Earlier this week I had some time to spare and I sat down in the living room on the sofa where only the cat sits. Armed with a huge cup of tea and three brand-spanking-new magazines that had arrived the day before, I looked forward to a trip thorough the fantasy land of women’s publications.

All of the periodicals had extensive articles about Thanksgiving, describing elaborately-decorated tables, mouth-watering side dishes and luscious desserts along with incredibly complicated methods of cooking the turkey and articles about how to reduce stress during the holidays. Hmm … how long ago was it that I thought that the thanksgiving meal was one of the easiest of the annual holiday feasts?

If I concocted a shopping list that reflected what we ate as children, teens and young adults for Thanksgiving dinner, it would look a bit like this. A 15 to 18 pound turkey; Pepperidge Farm stuffing, potatoes, canned yams, brown sugar, margarine, jellied cranberry sauce, frozen peas and Mrs. Smith’s pumpkin pie (the big one.) We would also have homemade biscuits from a recipe that I have committed to memory and mince pie, made from ingredients already on hand, since we always had flour, Crisco and my grandmother’s mincemeat made from the last green tomatoes of summer. It was a simple and simply wonderful feast for us, never exceeded by any that I’ve attempted since, full of the anticipation of the crisped turkey skin, the sage-savory stuffing, fluffy mashed potatoes with gravy, the sweetness of the yams and the decadence of two pieces of pie for dessert. At least that’s how I remember it.

The magazines describe something only vaguely like that. I came to an article in Living, the first magazine in the stack, about “holiday” cookies. Cookies, to me, are a big commitment. Cakes are relatively easy. You mix the batter, pour it into the pan, bake, unmold and frost. Cookies can mean refrigeration of the dough, rolling, cutting, baking, carefully removing onto racks and decorating. They also mean an aching back from leaning over the counter to work on all of this.

I read on. Martha wrote about her insistence on only using the best ingredients, quoting brands of chocolate that I can’t pronounce and which aren’t available in most of the stores that I frequent. She then tells the reader that, because cookies are so important, she is now looking for imported flours, artisanal imported butters and even more exotic chocolates, fruits and such. Yikes! What will these cookies, already a tour de force of work, cost in dollars? Yes, the lady does explain that these special ingredients create cookies that are especially tasty, but, gee, in my house a cookie doesn’t last long enough to be savored. They are inhaled.

How do you keep up? Or do you want to? I’m still getting used to arugula and Brussels sprouts.

This year, crazy schedules and a hip resurfacing (my sonin-law) have created the need to reorganize Thanksgiving. For my daughter and her family, it will be brunch at our house, featuring things like scones, biscuits, fruit and herbed butters … which by the way are easy to make and can be quite impressive. Emily and her boys, Tommy and Will, are scheduled to arrive very early. They will eat, share their reasons for being thankful and head back to Cazenovia for their next version of the day. Still, it will be one more chance to hug those growing boys as they transition into young men. A few hours is just as good as a whole day if hugs are available.

I am thinking of maybe some mimosas for myself, but I haven’t committed to that idea as yet.

Our son and his growing family, traveling over the hills and through the woods from Rochester, will arrive a bit later and we will then add a turkey casserole (made with Pepperidge Farm stuffing), cranberry sauce, some kind of veggie and a dessert that I can buy at Heart and Hand. The sweet one-year-old twins, appropriately bibbed, will sample some of our Thanksgiving fare, their chatter and laughter adding to the feast, along with a lot more hugs.

This kind of rag-tag Thanksgiving will be just fine and I won’t feel the least bit guilty, guilt being one of the enduring hallmarks of parenthood, particularly in females who read those glossy magazines.

It’s true that good ingredients, just like a good upbringing, make a better product or person, but there is a limit to what “good” means. For all of us, the act of preparation of a meal for others itself and the warmth of welcome that we offer to those we love, are the most singularly important ingredients. Those ingredients are as ordinary as a smile and can’t be bought for any price.

And I wouldn’t say no to help washing the dishes.

MoST iMPoRTAnT ingRedienTS

Ramblings from the empty nest Ann Ferro

Ann Ferro is a mother, a grandmother and a retired social studies teacher. While still figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, she lives in Marcellus with lots of books, a spouse and a large orange cat.

Spending half of my life at the games

Sometime on Thanksgiving weekend I will make my way back from quality time with the family and go back to work, the fall season fading away, the winter about to start.

And it will begin my 25th season on the Central New York high school sports scene. Only by writing those words can I honestly believe that a quarter-century has passed.

The young man who arrived at our old offices on Firestone Drive, single, hungry, eager to work, is now mature, married, middle-aged…and still quite excited about venturing out to gyms, hockey rinks and every venue in between.

Why is that the case? When so many others at this company, and in this industry, have long moved on, why do I still return to the same places to follow the hopes and dreams of students now old enough to be my children?

The answer is a complex one. Some of it has to do with the way the media world changed, and the fact that the places to which I might have aspired are mere shadows of what they once were, and had I gone, perhaps I would get swept away with so many other people far more talented, gifted and accomplished.

A bit of it involves the deep attachment I have felt for this area since my college days. Not everyone can stand the extremes here, especially the voracious snowfall, but at least here we get four seasons. Sometimes all in a month. Here, sports are a big deal, like everywhere, but instead of overwhelming and suffocating, it fits well into a larger social fabric. There’s an appreciation for culture and the arts without too much pretension, a place for faith and family, and a generosity that lies just beneath the surface if you stay here long enough.

Above all the other reasons, though, is just the fact that, at some unknown point all those years ago, the stories, people and atmosphere of high school sports entered my bloodstream and took permanent residence.

It was the way a season started, everyone full of optimism and eager to compete. The way a season built up, week by week, with special teams and athletes emerging, their stories building toward a post-season climax.

Then, when the championships were handed out, there was the complete spectrum of human emotion on display. Hugs and cheers, sadness and tears, sometimes within a few feet of one another, results that were decided in a matter of moments but would stay with them for a lifetime.

No matter how many times I have experienced it, those raw scenes still stir the soul. In those instances, if before you didn’t understand what sports meant, then you sure found out fast.

Maybe that’s why I bristle at all the criticism and vitriol thrown at people in sports when they don’t win. It’s almost as if, because they didn’t score one more point than the other side, somehow they’re deficient of character or heart, when most of the time they gave the full measure.

Spend enough time in college or (especially) professional sports, and this nitpicking and character assassination turns into a fulltime job. Everyone wants to show how tough they are. Big deal.

For a vast majority of kids taking part in high school sports, this is their athletic pinnacle, and they still see it as a game, at least if the adults around them haven’t tried to take all the fun out of it.

And being around it, even now, always somehow brings light and joy into my life, even when everything else seems so dark, or hopeless, or overwhelming.

Thus, I cannot thank all of them enough for the excitement and fun they have brought in the (still is weird to write this) 24 years spent on this job, with a 25th about to commence.

Maybe someday that fire, that passion, that love for high school sports will fade. But not yet, and not for a long while, I suspect.

As long as there are young men and women bringing recognition and pride to their communities through the unique spectacle and stage of high school sports, I will do my level best to make sure their efforts are not forgotten.

Random Thoughts Phil Blackwell

Phil Blackwell is sports editor at Eagle News. He can be reached at pblackwell@ eaglenewsonline.com.

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