A Very Special Thanksgiving

When it comes to food and ambiance, today’s Thanksgiving is unmatched, especially when compared with the original.

There’s this guy.

He’s having a communal dinner outside at a long, crooked, bare wood table with chopped and planked benches. There are way more people here than usual; they’ve had to fetch a few big logs for extras to sit on.

Half are total strangers; they’ve brought food he’s never seen. Like that questionable thing called an “eel” he watched getting chopped up earlier. And while he’s no stranger to corn, he’s never seen so many different foods made out of it—even bread and porridge!

He’s not comfortable, but it’s not because of the food. The crudely sewn woolen coat he’s wearing is rough, and bulky enough to make it hard to eat. He can’t take it off, though; they’re outside in the middle of his village’s wooden houses and its already 40 degrees. That will drop to freezing when the sun goes down, about an hour from now. No amount of cookfires on the packed earth around them will ward off that kind of cold.

He begins to eat his food off of—of all things—a large, but very stale piece of bread, about the size of a plank—the guests got the dull banged up pewter ones. To its left sit a few casually arranged mussel shells brought by the visitors that have been thoroughly cleaned out and upturned so they can be used like small dishes. He sees bean mash in one. Chopped nuts in another. Most common is berries mashed together with what he just heard called “cornmeal.”

He scoops servings onto his plank using a piece of bark about the size of a tongue depressor; they go next to the spit roasted piece of meat someone cut off for him. He usually doesn’t eat wild turkey—they run around, get lean, and can be pretty tough to eat—but this is a special occasion. There’s even roasted pumpkin and boiled squash for dessert!

This guy is at the very first Thanksgiving.

Though there is more to Thanksgiving than food and dining ambiance, it’s hard to ignore how superior today’s options really are. For starters, wheat flour isn’t rare like it was then, so there’s no shortage of breads and rolls that you actually eat (not to mention turkey stuffing without cornmeal mush). And the refinement of sugar has exploded since those early days, giving us a universe of desserts they could only dream about then.

Plus, as all convenience retailers know, modern Thanksgiving promotions and seasonal merchandise create opportunities for profitability, while adding all kinds of variety to what the consumer consumes, provided in settings a lot more agreeable than outside during a fall New England evening.

Now while it may be true that food and serving conditions of that first Thanksgiving are pretty outdated, the sentiments of gratitude that have become part of the holiday are as timely ever. In that spirit, and because there will be no SSCS Blog next week, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers, without whom there could be no SSCS. Continued success and growth to all.

Happy Thanksgiving!