Thanksgiving 2009

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and all week the Island has been buzzing again with many people coming and others heading off to spend the holiday with family and friends. Synonymous with cornucopia, Morning Glory Farm in Edgartown is all decked out for the season in colorful winter squashes, dried flowers, curly kale, golden jams and honey. Andrea Rogers’s artful homemade brooms hang from the rafters like so many crooked smiles; outside cordwood is stacked on the porch where just two months ago number ten cans stuffed with summer flowers ruled the rails.

At Whippoorwill Farm early this week there was creamy white cauliflower, crisp and sweet from a light brush with frost, and a small table set up for sturdy farm shareholders to grind their own cornmeal with dried dent corn, grown right there in the fields this summer.

And the living local continues all weekend, with the annual Fall Festival at Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown today, the Artisans’ Festival in West Tisbury today and tomorrow.

Soon it will be winter.

The late Hal Borland wrote the following essay for late November:

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Quiet has come to the country, the Winter quiet that waits on no arbitrary season of calendar or solstice. It is not only an aural quiet, but a visual one, something seen and felt as well as heard. The insects that buzzed and hummed and scratched are silenced now, save for an occasional fireside cricket. And the songbirds have gone south with the sun, leaving the countryside to the crows, the jays and the lesser birds that may gossip among themselves but do little town crying and engage in no concerts. It is a quiet in which one will be able to hear snowflakes nudging each other as they fall.

The visual quiet is almost as complete, for now we have a world of muted colors. Maples stand in gray and brown nakedness, even the drifts of their leaves dulled by early leaching of rain and frost. Oaks, their trunks black with the damp of morning mist, wear the tatters of old, worn buckskin in their clinging leaves. Beeches stand stiff and silvery, stripped to the restless wind. And the sumac is a lifting of gnarled, frost-blackened fingers toward the distant sun.

The pines stand green, and the hemlocks, looking greener than they did in September but still subdued. The quiet of their green needs a backdrop of snow to call the eye to attention. The cedars dull into the background, the anonymous cedars.

Here and there one sees the blush of wild rose haws or the warmth of orange fruit on the bittersweet; and back in the woods is the occasional twinkle of partridgeberries. But they are the gem stones, the rare decorations, which make the grays, the browns and the greens seem even more quiet, more completely at rest.

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Thanksgiving weekend on the Island has its own many traditions associated with living in a coastal community: scalloping and oystering are a perfect way to work off all the pie and mashed potatoes consumed around the table with family and friends — and of course get ready for the next meal.

In that light, consider the following account that appeared in the Vineyard Gazette in 1888 describing the Thanksgiving meal of that year:

“Thanksgiving breakfast: Coffee, devilled oysters on toast, watercress salad, fried chicken, cream sauce, baked sweet potato, tomato omelette, Malaga grapes.

“Thanksgiving dinner: Stewed oysters, broiled smelts, sauce maitre d’hotel, Parisian potatoes, squirrel potpie hunter’s style, stewed cauliflower, roast turkey, cranberry sauce, celery mayonnaise, fruitcake, lady fingers, pumpkin pie, mince pie, cheese, assorted nuts and fruits.”

No mention of supper.

But the same issue of the Gazette carried a fine illustrated advertisement of caskets, coffins and burial robes.