48. HOW WE KEPT THANKSGIVING AT OLDTOWN By Harriet Beecher Stowe HARRIET BEECHER STOWE was a member of the Beecher family which has included so many noted men and women. She was born in Litchfield, Conn., June 14, 1811, and before her marriage to Professor Calvin E. Stowe was a teacher in a girl's school in Cincinnati which had been established by an elder sister. Her career as an author began with her famous story "Uncle Tom's Cabin." This was written as a magazine tale and was published in "The National Era," but Mrs. Stowe, feeling keenly the evils of slavery, added to her work until it became a good-sized volume. The publication brought her great reputation as well as money; but what she valued more, it was a powerful instrument in the struggle which finally resulted in the abolition of slavery in our country. Though the best known and perhaps the most popular of her works, " Uncle Tom" does not rank the highest from a literary point of view; her later stories are more finished and are full of delightful interest. Mrs. Stowe was well acquainted with New England people, and in "Oldtown Folks" she gives a quaint and charming picture of village life and the good old way of keeping the one holiday these old-fashioned people recognized and enjoyed. Besides more than thirty books, Mrs. Stowe wrote magazine articles and stories, and was busy with her pen until her death, which occurred July 1, 1896. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE W PART ONE HEN the apples were all gathered and the cider was all made, and the yellow pumpkins were rolled in from many a hill in billows of gold, and the corn was husked, and the labors of the season were done, and the warm, late days of Indian summer came in, dreamy and calm and still, with just frost enough to crisp the ground of a morning, but with warm trances of benignant, sunny hours at noon, there came over the community a sort of genial repose of spirit, a sense of something accomplished, and of a new golden mark made in advance on the calendar of life, and the deacon began to say to the minister, of a Sunday, "I suppose it's about time for the Thanksgiving proclamation." Rural dressmakers about this time were extremely busy in making up festival garments, for everybody's new dress, if she was to have one at all, must appear on Thanksgiving day. Aunt Keziah and Aunt Lois and my mother talked over their bonnets, and turned them round and round on their hands, and discoursed sagely of ribbons and linings, and of all the kindred bonnets that there were in the parish, and how they would probably appear after Thanksgiving. My grandmother, whose mind had long ceased to wander on such worldly vanities, was at this time officiously reminded by her daughters that her bonnet wasn't respectable, or it was announced to her that she must have a new gown. Such were the distant horizon gleams of the Thanksgiving festival. We also felt its approach in all departments of the household, - the conversation at this time beginning to turn on high and solemn culinary mysteries and receipts of wondrous power and virtue. New modes of elaborating squash pies and quince tarts were now ofttimes carefully discussed at the evening fireside by Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and notes seriously compared with the experiences of certain other aunties of high repute in such matters. I noticed that on these occasions their voices often fell into mysterious whispers, and that receipts of especial power and sanctity were communicated in tones so low as entirely to escape the vulgar ear. I still remember the solemn shake of the head with which my Aunt Lois conveyed to Miss Mehitable Rossiter the critical properties of mace, in relation to its powers of producing in corn fritters a suggestive resemblance to oysters. As ours was an oyster-getting district, and as that charming bivalve was perfectly easy to come at, the interest in such an imitation can be accounted for only by the fondness of the human mind for works of art. For as much as a week beforehand, "we children" were employed in chopping mince for pies to a most wearisome fineness, and in pounding cinnamon, allspice, and cloves in a great lignum vitæ mortar; and the sound of this pounding and chopping reëchoed through all the rafters. In those days there were none of the thousand ameliorations of the labors of housekeeping which have since arisen,-in ground and prepared spices and sweet herbs; everything came into our hands in the rough, and in bulk, and the reducing of it into a state for use was deemed one of the appropriate labors of childhood. Even the very salt that we used in cooking was rock-salt, which we were required to wash and dry and pound and sift, before it became fit for use. And now came on the week in earnest. In the very watches of the night preceding Monday morning, a preternatural stir below stairs, and the thunder of the pounding barrel, announced that the washing was to be got out of the way before daylight, so as to give "ample scope and room enough" for the more pleasing duties of the season. The making of pies at this period assumed vast proportions that verged upon the sublime. Pies were made by forties and fifties and hundreds, and made of everything on the earth and under the earth. The pie is an English institution which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, pies with top crusts, and pies without,-pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural stripes laid across and around and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction. Fancy the heat and vigor of the great pan-formation, when Aunt Lois and Aunt Keziah, and my mother, and grandmother, all in ecstasies of creative inspiration, ran, bustled, and hurried, — mixing, rolling, tasting, consulting, — alternately setting us children to work when anything could be made of us, and then chasing us all out of the kitchen when our misinformed childhood ventured to take too many liberties with sacred mysteries. Then out we would all fly at the kitchen door like sparks from a blacksmith's window. . . . |