Stealing Thanksgiving....

I've always loved Norman Rockwell's art...it's always seemed to me, here in sometimes grey & rainy Britain,to symbolise all that's exciting, shiny, hopeful about the United States. GIs in uniform, their caps at a jaunty angle (" got any gum, chum?!"), little girls with pigtails and freckles, dime stores, drug stores, ice cream sodas, pecan pies, coke bottles, ladies in 1950's swirly skirts with little white gloves and well groomed young husbands...and Thanksgiving! A magical holiday in the dreary month before the glitz of Christmas.
As a child, of course, my admiration was tinged with envy. Another day off school! Another wonderful family dinner! Perhaps presents??
But now that I'm older, I just think what a beautiful thing it must be to have a day set aside to celebrate...everything! Health, happiness, home. I wonder why we don't have it here - after all, those pilgrims were British when they landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620! We should have given thanks for their success, at least! What a time that must have been. Absolutely terrifying. Much as I adore New England, a part of me always feels a little sad when I see all those familiar names: Taunton, Bridgewater,Warwick, Greenwich, Mansfield, Uxbridge...Braintree, Weymouth, even Boston itself!They all speak to me of the homesickness those early settlers must have felt. Clinging on to a little of what they'd known, in the wilderness and unfamiliarity of their new surroundings. Of course, I'm sure it was no picnic for the native Americans either...these blustering newcomers with their sense of entitlement, come to inhabit their land...
But here we are. Nearly 400 years later. And I like to think that most of the Thanksgiving prayers around the millions of tables today.. groaning with turkeys, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pies...won't differ so very much from those said at the first celebrations all those hundreds of years ago. Thanks for friends, for family, for health and for the beauty and bounty of the country that we live in.

I'll second that. Happy Thanksgiving, America. I'm so glad the Mayflower made it...

xoxo