thanksgiving story

Anyone who has ever had to listen to foodies argue over which wine pairs best with turkey knows that Thanksgiving can inspire vehement―and tiresome―disagreement. But of all the questions connected with our celebration of Thanksgiving, none provokes as much heat as the debate over religion's place at the table.

A few years ago, some Christians began to sound the alarm about a "war on Christmas," alleging that schools, courts, and local governments were transforming a sacred holiday into a secularized winter festival. Now, much as the 24-hour Christmas music on the radio seems to start earlier each year, a few believers are voicing their worry about the secularization of our society in November instead of December. Concerned about the eroding religious dimension of Thanksgiving, they urge a return to a more sacred holiday. If the war-on-Christmas crowd asks us to put Christ back into Christmas, these Thanksgiving religionists urge us to celebrate Thanksgiving with the emphasis on thanking God. But complaints about a secularized Thanksgiving are even less convincing than the outcry over Christmas.

As holidays go, Thanksgiving has long suffered from an especially acute spiritual identity crisis. Even the most casually religious Americans say grace or otherwise offer thanks before Thanksgiving dinner―even if the thanking is done between pie-eating binges. On the other hand, it's not as common for us to attend a worship service on Thanksgiving as it is on more obviously religious days like Christmas and Easter. So, just how religious of a holiday should we consider Thanksgiving? Some seem to want to answer that question by telling us exactly how and Call me sentimental, but some of my favorite television commercials are the ones during the holiday season. I'm especially fond of the Thanksgiving commercials by Publix. The big extended family celebrating around the dinner table always reminds me of one of my favorite Norman Rockwell paintings, which also happens to portray an extended family on Thanksgiving Day.

One of my favorite Thanksgiving stories doesn't even include my own family. It happened back in the early 1980s when I was a young reporter for the Macon Telegraph & News in Macon, Ga. My city editor loved feature writing and enterprise pieces. He stopped by my desk just before Thanksgiving one year and told me he wanted me to find and write a story about a traditional family Thanksgiving get together. The story would run Thanksgiving Day on the front page. And he didn't ask me if I wanted to do it, either. Worse, he made it clear that he wanted Norman Rockwell in print.

Talk about pressure. How in the name of Pete do you even find such a story, let alone capture it literally at the last minute? And, in the words of my editor, "make it sing" to boot? In desperation, my photographer and I went to see an old priest who was the pastor of a parish made up mostly of poor black parishioners. He called me back later that afternoon and gave me an address and phone number and said we were expected. I wish I could remember the family's name but it's been so long I can't. Let's just say the Green family.

At the arranged time the day before Thanksgiv-ing, I went to Mrs. Green's house and knocked on the door. The smell of collards simmering and sweet potatoes baking grabbed me by my nose and dragged me through the house and into one of the biggest kitchens I've ever seen. There, Mrs. Green and her youngest daughter, who I reckoned to be in her early 20s, were preparing the family's annual Thanksgiving feast for the other sons, daughters and grandchildren, all of whom would begin pouring in that evening. As she ground fresh nutmeg for one of about a dozen sweet potato and pumpkin pies she was preparing, the kitchen came alive with its pungent fragrance and Mrs. Green proceeded to tell me the most heartwarming Thanksgiving story I've heard.

Mrs. Green and her husband had 10 children. Mr. Green worked for the railroad and died when the kids were young. Mrs. Green worked as a domestic, cleaning and caring for other people's homes. She didn't want to rely on charity, she told me, so when hard times came, and come they did, she persevered. It was her dream that her children would have all the things in life she never had, even if she had to work her fingers to the bone to provide them. She vowed that each of them would have a college education and a professional career if they chose. And with a determination as rugged as the old mixing bowl she made pie filling in as I watched, she kept that promise.


She went on to tell me that every one of her children was a success story. There were doctors, nurses, attorneys, schoolteachers and military officers. Her children prospered and were spread out all across the globe raising families of their own but they all came home to be together on Thanksgiving. And they brought oodles of grandchildren with them when they came.

Mrs. Green's kitchen in the same old house in which she'd been living since she and her husband married was full of implements and ingredients for putting together a feast to top all feasts. The counters were lined with eggs waiting to be cracked and beaten. Flour was sifted and waiting in wooden bowls for the caring hands that would knead them into mouth-watering biscuits. The whole house was a symphony of aromas so rich I could nearly taste them. The love and the pride in Mrs. Green's voice was the secret ingredient in all of it.

As I took notes and listened to Mrs. Green talk about her family and how long she'd had this recipe or that, and how fresh nutmeg you grind yourself can't be topped by the ground variety in a can, it dawned on me that Norman Rockwell himself couldn't have captured a more spectacular family portrait on canvas. And how blessed I was to have been chosen to chronicle such a special Thanksgiving story in print.

Many other local residents in need also lined up outside the agency office on North Main Street to receive a Thanksgiving dinner complete with a turkey, cranberry sauce, corn, gravy, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, and, of course, apple pie.

They were bundled up against the wintry weather as they stood in a line that extended down the block outside the agency. While waiting as snow began to fall, they watched the Catholic Charities staff take turkeys off a truck and bag them with the rest of the ingredients for the holiday meal.

Brockton's Catholic Charities purchased a total of 900 turkeys, 150 more than last year, and distributed most of them Monday.

Catholic Charities is one of the local non-profit agencies that partners with The Enterprise Helping Hands Fund each year to provide the essentials of life to those in need during the holiday season and beyond.

This year, an unprecedented jump in home foreclosures has inflated the number of needy people in the area. A ripple effect from skyrocketing foreclosures is putting more and more pressure on social service agencies to provide help with housing, food, fuel assistance and other essentials of life.

Based on demand, "We could easily give out 1,000 turkeys," Robert Loxley, Catholic Charities' initial response coordinator, said Monday.

As a result of the increased demand, Catholic Charities had to raise even more money than usual to afford so many turkey dinners. Events such as golf outings have helped collect the funds necessary to feed so many more needy people.

The food purchased by Catholic Charities will feed about 3,000 hungry area residents.

Distributing Thanksgiving dinners is the largest individual event that Catholic Charities runs though its Basic Needs and Emergency Services program.

"This is kind of like the Basic Needs and Emergency Services kickoff event," said Tiziana Dearing, president of Catholic Charities.

For the next four months, Basic Needs will help pay the heating and rent bills for less-fortunate residents.

This is in addition to providing the usual, year-round services, such as the food pantry.

Regular food pantry clients make up a large number of the Thanksgiving dinner clients, Loxley said.

Brockton resident Margarette Camille, 46, picked up her Thanksgiving dinner from Catholic Charities for the first time Monday, but has visited the food pantry in the past.

Although most of the Thanksgiving clients are usually regular patrons, newcomers are always welcome.

"Anyone who is hungry can come get a Thanksgiving dinner," Loxley said.

The Helping Hands Fund is supported with donations from families, individuals, business, civic and school groups. It is administered by The Enterprise Charitable Foundation.

From now through Dec. 31, the foundation will raise money through direct donations from individuals and groups, and through fundraising events, including the December Jingle Bell Run in Brockton.

Last year, the foundation awarded grants to more than 20 charitable agencies throughout the region. One hundred percent of the donations is distributed to area agencies.
RUSH: Guess what? Thanksgiving week, guess what we got a shortage of, folks? "'Food Pantries Struggling With Shortages.' -- Operators of free food banks say they are seeing more working people needing assistance. The increased demand is outstripping supplies and forcing many pantries and food banks to cut portions. Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline..." and global warming and everything else that's filled with doom and gloom. "...wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks."

Isn't this just fascinating? On Thanksgiving week, here comes the guilt trip, folks. They used to do it with Thursday football. They'd go to the halftime and the local stations would do some little local news insert, and they'd send somebody down to the nearest homeless shelter and show these people, these poor, suffering people, just clawing food into their mouths like they haven't eaten in a year. The tone of the report would be, "How dare you sit at home enjoying the comfort coziness of your family and your Thanksgiving dinner? Look at these people!" Now it's food banks that have run out of food. It's so timely. Those stories, by the way, do not appear when Democrats are in the White House.


BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Matt in Phoenix, nice to have you with us today, sir. Welcome.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Hey, I was thinking earlier about the -- something caught my attention there earlier on the Thanksgiving story about the food shortages. If the manufacturers and the suppliers don't have any extra to give away, doesn't that mean they're selling all their supplies to somebody?

RUSH: Well, of course. But that's not the way we're supposed to interpret this. Let me rephrase or reread from the story that got Matt's attention here. By the way, I'm the one adding the Thanksgiving angle. Well, I haven't read the whole story, but they might make a Thanksgiving connection here, and the reader is supposed to. You're supposed to infer this. Demand is being driven up at these food pantries that are struggling with shortages. "Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline, and wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Food Banks." So if food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, are finding that they have less surplus food to donate, that must mean they're selling it, correct?

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: Now, if they're selling it, what does that tell you, Matt?

CALLER: Means we got money to spend.

RUSH: And what does all this holiday travel tell you? Now they're issuing tips on how to pack, for crying out loud; do it neatly. Now, the president went out there and tried to limit the crowds, extra baggage handlers, and skycaps, and kiosks. We're supposedly in the midst of this really struggling and challenging economy, rising fuel prices has people panicked, the mortgage slump, people being kicked out of their homes, and yet, people have enough money to fly all over the country in droves, setting records all week, got enough money to go out and buy food, so much so that there's less to give away. So how can we have such a rotten economy?

CALLER: Well, gotta create victims somehow.

RUSH: Especially at Thanksgiving week with a Republican in the White House.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ellen, Rocky River, Ohio. Ellen, by the way, is one of my all-time favorite top-ten female names.

CALLER: Is it really?

RUSH: Yeah, it really is.

CALLER: Thanks for taking the call. It's been a couple years since I called. I'm glad I got through.

RUSH: I missed you.

CALLER: Oh, have you really? (laughing)

RUSH: I was telling Snerdley the other day, "I haven't talked to Ellen in a couple years."

CALLER: Well, here I am back today. The reason I'm calling is I was watching 60 Minutes last night, which was probably a big mistake.

RUSH: My condolences. What are you doing? There was a pretty good football game on last night, another massacre in Buffalo.

CALLER: Well, it's just going to pain me to say it, but I'm really not a football person. But, as I'm channel surfing, I got in on Lesley Stahl's interview of Thomas Frieden, whom I find out is the health commissioner of the city of New York, and it was about a 15-minute interview, on his fiat, if you will, that he is going to at least attempt to mandate that all of the fast food places have posted on their walls what the caloric value, or caloric count is on the fast food. And, as I looked at this man, and I have to tell you, I'm a medical professional; I'm a nurse manager. So I understand that there is an obesity epidemic, and I also understand that you could probably infer from that that there has been an explosion of diabetes. There is no doubt about it.

RUSH: Do you also know, as a health care professional, have you heard about the story from last week that overweight people live longer?

CALLER: I did hear that. I did hear that, and that's not going to play well as far as the conventional wisdom.

RUSH: Of course not.

CALLER: But the thrust of this was -- now, he didn't say it in so many words, but he was smug, he was officious, and he was intrusive. He was going to decide for us that we were, A, too stupid to know that when you go to the fast food places, it is fat laden. I don't go to McDonald's with any frequency because, as good as it is, I know it's going to be a fat-laden meal.

RUSH: You know, Ellen, I have to tell you, you should call more often than two years. This is just the latest example of nannyism in New York. You can't use trans-fats, you can't smoke anywhere, outside or inside, and yet they're taxing tobacco products through the roof to pay for health care programs and then making it impossible to use the product, so fewer and fewer people are buying it. But it's been a Nanny State run by Mayor Bloomberg for a long time. This caloric content on the fast food, I thought that that had been shelved. Maybe it was some other state that it's been shelved in because somebody was saying, this is absurd, it's going to raise costs, post it all over the restaurants and so forth, but learn something fast. I mean you know this.

You're talking about somebody who's a liberal Democrat in New York. They view average people with condescension and contempt. You don't know how to make the decisions necessary to get through life. That's why you need them. They want you as dependent as possible. They really do think of you as that dumb, that you don't realize when you're eating a fistful of french fries that you're eating a lot of calories, they really think you may not know that, they think that Big Fast Food is screwing you and lying to you about the dangerous ingredients, and so here comes Big Government to want to warn you and protect you because they really think that you're idiots. It's one of the primary problems with Big Government and liberalism in general is this lack of faith in the individual to overcome obstacles and make responsible decisions, leading his or her own life. I gotta run. Quick break. Nice to hear from you again, Ellen.