Thanksgiving On The Farm

We ate our last Thanksgiving dinner on the homestead in 2017. This year, we had family in at our new Ferndale house. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, not German, but Germans never pass up an opportunity to celebrate a holiday. Thanksgiving was nothing compared to Christmas on the Waschke Homestead, but it was an event nonetheless.

I remember celebrating Thanksgiving on the homestead while Grandpa and Grandma still lived in the downstairs part of the house. After Grandpa retired and they moved across the road, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I began going to Lynden for Thanksgiving with my Lynden grandparents. My cousin Denny and I could never stop ourselves from roughhousing on the floor. Someone would have to break us up. I don’t remember that we ever hurt each other, but we rolled around on the floor, each trying to get the upper hand. That must have caused some heartburn among the parents, but there was no real aggression involved. I could not tell you why we wrestled, but we did until we became self-conscious adolescents, had little to say to each other, and replaced wrestling with the awkward silence.

My Waschke Road grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner was, as I remember, a version of Christmas dinner in which the Christmas goose was replaced with a turkey. My Waschke cousins may correct me on this, but as I remember the menu was turkey with sweet cinnamon bread, apple, and raisin stuffing, sweet and sour red cabbage with apples, and mashed potatoes with turkey pan gravy. The crisp turkey skin was like candy.

The Lynden menu was more in the American tradition: turkey with a savory sage stuffing, boiled sweet and white potatoes, green beans, and pumpkin pie. The star of the day for me was sweet potatoes. I could have filled my plate with sweet potatoes.

Grandma Schuyleman was a not a bad cook, but a plain cook. She had neither time nor inclination for anything fancy. She seasoned her turkey with salt and pepper and roasted it. She peeled her sweet potatoes and boiled them with salt. Her turkey was neither over or under roasted. She took her boiling potatoes and green beans off the fire when they were done. Her table was predestined to be just what it was: plain cooking with all the nonsense reformed out, undisguised food to strengthen the body, not satisfy the senses.

How I loved her sweet potatoes. The custom was to cover them in butter on the plate and I followed the custom, but if the butter took its time getting to the kids’ end of the table, plain unbuttered sweet potatoes were good enough for me. I could finish half the sweet potatoes on my plate before the butter arrived. The turkey was fine, as is every variety of poultry when it is cooked but not dry. Green beans and white potatoes were part of practically every meal I ever ate on any farm. Since my mother learned to cook from her mother, no big meh on the Thanksgiving beans and white potatoes. But the sweet potatoes! Allow me to say, my dear wife Rebecca to the contrary, yams are okay, but they taste a lot like squash, which is good, but starchy sweet potatoes are king.

Sweet potatoes and turkey on Thanksgiving were exceptional because they were not grown on the farm, either in Lynden next to the Nooksack River or on Waschke Road.

I once asked my dad about The Depression. He graduated from high school in 1932, before Franklin Roosevelt was elected. At the graduation ceremony, the principal gave a speech in which he told the graduates that they couldn’t expect much: no jobs, no prospects, their diplomas were almost worthless. Dad said he was disappointed and disgusted.

Other than that depressing speech, Dad said the Great Depression was barely noticeable to his family because the farm was self-sufficient. They scarcely needed cash. What little cash they needed to pay the electric bill, buy gasoline and coffee grounds, they could always get by selling farm produce directly—people always eat—but he pitied the shingle and saw mill workers, loggers, and the miners that depended on jobs that disappeared when the economy went sour. The situation didn’t change on Waschke Road until the war.