Author: NewMexiKen

Talkin’ turkey

  • Turkey has tryptophan in it, which makes you sleepy. So here’s a tip that I learned from Mom to have turkey that doesn’t make you sleepy. The night before Mom marinates the turkey in Red Bull.
  • Tomorrow is the big Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. There is a White House balloon this year — but it won’t stop leaking.

David Letterman

  • They say that Abraham Lincoln cemented the idea of a National Day of Thanksgiving during the Civil War. To get people’s minds off all the political strife and division brought about by war. Thank God those days are gone forever.
  • Yesterday President Bush officially pardoned the White House turkey. Then after he pardoned the turkey he appointed it the new head of FEMA.

Jay Leno

The Pilgrims

Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

From the only contemporary account of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving, a letter by Edward Winslow dated December 11, 1621.

The Thanksgivings before the Pilgrims

To see what the first Thanksgiving was like you have to go to: Texas. Texans claim the first Thanksgiving in America actually took place in little San Elizario, a community near El Paso, in 1598 — twenty-three years before the Pilgrims’ festival. For several years they have staged a reenactment of the event that culminated in the Thanksgiving celebration: the arrival of Spanish explorer Juan de Onate on the banks of the Rio Grande. De Onate is said to have held a big Thanksgiving festival after leading hundreds of settlers on a grueling 350-mile long trek across the Mexican desert.

Then again, you may want to go to Virginia.. At the Berkeley Plantation on the James River they claim the first Thanksgiving in America was held there on December 4th, 1619….two years before the Pilgrims’ festival….and every year since 1958 they have reenacted the event. In their view it’s not the Mayflower we should remember, it’s the Margaret, the little ship which brought 38 English settlers to the plantation in 1619. The story is that the settlers had been ordered by the London company that sponsored them to commemorate the ship’s arrival with an annual day of Thanksgiving. Hardly anybody outside Virginia has ever heard of this Thanksgiving, but in 1963 President Kennedy officially recognized the plantation’s claim.

Rick Shenkman at the History News Network

What historians do know about Thanksgiving

Conclusion from a thoughtful and thorough article in The Christian Science Monitor (November 27, 2002).

There are many myths surrounding Thanksgiving. Here are nine things we do know are true about the holiday.

1. The first Thanksgiving was a harvest celebration in 1621 that lasted for three days.

2. The feast most likely occurred between Sept. 21 and Nov. 11.

3. Approximately 90 Wampanoag Indians and 52 colonists – the latter mostly women and children – participated.

4. The Wampanoag, led by Chief Massasoit, contributed at least five deer to the feast.

5. Cranberry sauce, potatoes – white or sweet – and pies were not on the menu.

6. The Pilgrims and Wampanoag communicated through Squanto, a member of the Patuxet tribe, who knew English because he had associated with earlier explorers. [In fact, Squanto (or Tisquantum), had spent several years in Europe and England.]

7. Besides meals, the event included recreation and entertainment.

8. There are only two surviving descriptions of the first Thanksgiving. One is in a letter by colonist Edward Winslow. He mentions some of the food and activities. The second description was in a book written by William Bradford 20 years afterward. His account was lost for almost 100 years.

9. Abraham Lincoln named Thanksgiving an annual holiday in 1863.

Native Foods Nourish Again

How about some “three sisters soup” in tomorrow’s Thanksgiving menu? Read about American Indian foods in this interesting article by Kim Severson in The New York Times. Two excerpts:

As American Indians try to reverse decades of physical and cultural erosion, they are turning to the food that once sustained them, and finding allies in the nation’s culinary elite and marketing experts.

One result is the start of a new sort of native culinary canon that rejects oily fry bread but embraces wild rice from Minnesota, salmon from Alaska and the Northwest, persimmons and papaws from the Southeast, corn from New York, bison from the Great Plains and dozens of squashes, beans, berries and melons.

Modern urban menus are beginning to feature three sisters soup, built from the classic Indian trilogy of beans, squash and corn.
…

Native foods encompass hundreds of different cultures. “There’s only now becoming a more pan-Indian sense of what Native food can be,” said the author Louise Erdrich, whose mother was Ojibwa. She writes about tribal food in many of her books and is working on a cookbook with her sister, a pediatrician on the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

“You’re talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a long time,” Ms. Erdrich said.

American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that has yet to be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi reservation in Oklahoma.

“You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can’t eat indigenous foods native to the Americas,” said Ms. Oden….

One item that won’t be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy circles of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations. That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal government commodities, including white flour and lard – the two ingredients in fry bread.

Thanksgiving regulations

From The New Yorker (published November 24, 2003):

Article XII of the 1663 Jamestown Convention has been amended as of this date to include the following:

1. Thanksgiving-dinner guests are no longer required to play Scrabble, Go Fish, or Monopoly with children under the age of ten. Withholding of liquor is coercion.

9. Reminiscences that touch upon parental favoritism, unpaid personal loans, and arrests of blood relations’ children are discouraged.

10. You are entitled to ten naps per twelve-hour Thanksgiving Day period. Moments after 4 p.m., when time itself seems to have stopped, do not count as naps. Do not commence a nap when a blood relation older than you is addressing you directly.

There’s several more.

Hockey in June. Mistletoe in October. Fruitcakes Are Forever.

But one department store, at least, has resisted the pressure to start celebrating Christmas even before the leaves have fallen from the trees: Nordstrom. The chain, founded in Seattle in 1901, does not unveil its holiday decorations until the day after Thanksgiving.

“We think it is good policy to celebrate one holiday at a time,” said Pete Nordstrom, the president of Nordstrom stores.

From an article in The New York Times

God bless you Nordstrom.

Training for Balloon Handlers at Parade Is Said to Be Light

The New York Times reports that:

Balloon Training Flyer

[O]ver the years Macy’s has quietly backed away from that assurance, internal company documents and interviews with handlers show. So tomorrow, with forecasters calling for rain and heavy winds, many untrained volunteers will help wrangle flopping towers of polyurethane through Midtown guided only by instruction sheets reminiscent of airline safety cards.
 

[Click on the image to enlarge]

Thanks to Veronica for the pointer.

Office Suite Software Without the Sticker Shock

Those interested in Microsoft Office should consider OpenOffice. Rob Pegoraro takes a close look at the Office Suite Software Without the Sticker Shock. His findings are mixed, but he likes the price.

Fortunately, there’s another choice — a free one, called OpenOffice.org 2.0. This open-source release doesn’t do much to alleviate the complexity of office-suite software, but it has brought the cost down to a figure most people should like: nothing.

This set of programs (Win 98 or newer or Linux, free at http://www.openoffice.org/ ) is built around its Writer, Calc and Impress components, counterparts to Microsoft’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint. OpenOffice also throws in database, drawing and math-equation tools — but it lacks an equivalent to Microsoft’s Outlook e-mail/address book/calendar. …

OpenOffice, more so than most other programs competing with what comes out of Redmond, has to live in a Microsoft world. It can’t just function on its own, but it also has to read and write Microsoft’s closed, proprietary formats.

That’s a challenge OpenOffice can usually meet.

Thanks to Nora for the link.

All Googlie

NewMexiKen is having an unusually high number of visits today. The busiest day ever, in fact. I became curious. Is it my superb story-telling about the Kennedy assassination or Christmases past? Is it the wittiness of the “best lines of the day”? What could it be?

Eureka! I have found it!

If you do a Google Search on Good Things About Being an 18-year-old Mayor, the number one pick is NewMexiKen. Which is nice. I’m glad. The strange thing is that my “Good Things About Being an 18-year-old Mayor” is from a Letterman Show Top-Ten and NewMexiKen is number one on Google but Letterman is number two (as this is written).

What’s good for the goose isn’t necessarily good for the goslings

From an AP news item:

The House on Tuesday agreed to a $3,100 pay raise for Congress next year to $165,200 after defeating an effort to roll it back. …

“It’s not a pay raise,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. “It’s an adjustment so that they’re not losing their purchasing power.”

Federal minimum wage: $5.15. It’s been $5.15 since 1997. Loss of purchasing power: About 19.4%.

In 1997, Congressional salaries were $133,600. If the minimum wage was raised only as much as Congressional salaries have been raised — by the Congressmen themselves; I mean there hasn’t been a big groundswell that I’ve heard to increase Congressional salaries — then the minimum wage would become $6.37 in January.

Bah! Humbug!

It appears I have been tagged with a holiday meme. Blame Reecie.

Name 3 people you absolutely miss right this moment that you haven’t seen in some time.
1) Two that matter most at Christmas are Mom and G’ma. Long departed; missed every day, especially this time of the year.
2) No one else. I’d go see them.

Name 3 things you miss about home during the holidays (be it people, smells, foods, whatever).
1) I don’t do a Christmas tree and I miss having one, though not enough to buy and decorate the damn thing. I hate buying and decorating Christmas trees.
2) A real fire in the fireplace, not just fake logs and gas. This year I will have a real fire.
3) For some years I have visited my daughters at Christmas and it’s terrific, especially when my sons can be there too (and the spouses and kids). But it would be nice to have them all at my house one year. I’d get a Christmas tree.

Name 1 holiday memory that you have from childhood that you will never forget.
I can’t remember.

Name at least 1 favorite book or movie that always reminds you of the holidays.
O.Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, which I post on NewMexiKen each year in full. Elf is good. Bad Santa is a fun film, but not as a “Christmas” movie. Don’t make that mistake.

Name your top 3 4 favorite holiday songs that get you in the mood to celebrate.
1) “Jingle Bell Rock” performed by my granddaughter Kiley.
2) The Charlie Brown version of “O Tannebaum.”
3) The Drifters “White Christmas.”
4) The Stevie Nicks version of “Silent Night,” but that’s a whole different mood to celebrate.

If you could go anywhere other than home for the holidays, where would you choose to go and who would you want to bring along?
Bethlehem. I’m mean, why not? At least once. I’d take my children and their spouses and significant other and my grandchildren. And a few friends. London and Rome, too, on the way. Or Kauai.

The Grinch or Rudolph?
Rudolph. He showed the other reindeer, the bastards.

Formal holiday dinner or casual get-together food?
Probably dinner on Thanksgiving (that is what Thanksgiving has become all about). With cranberries. Casual food on Christmas and New Year’s Day. As long as one of those meals includes the traditional lasagna.

Name the best holiday gift you ever received and why.
What, and piss everyone else off. No, way.

Describe the funniest holiday moment you’ve ever had.
I guess when Ken, the oldest, was about 19 months old. He got up earlier than his parents and undecorated the Christmas tree, taking every ornament off that he could reach and lining them all up in a nice row on the sofa.

Another one was when the kids were little and my mother visited just before Christmas to buy presents. When we suggested clothes and underwear and things, she said, “OK, but I’ll have to get them toys, too. I’m not going to be remembered as the underwear grandma.”

Name a holiday memory that truly warmed your heart.
I made my children a puppet theater one year. Nothing elaborate, but kind of cool. Their mom made them a passle of puppets, including one that looked like each of the four of them. Thinking about being Santa for all those years warms my heart pretty good.

Name your top 3 favorite TV specials that frequent the airwaves during the holiday season.
1) A Charlie Brown Christmas.
2) The Christmas Story. The kid will shoot his eye out.
3) A Christmas Carol. I prefer the George C. Scott version.

I own DVDs of all three.

Sledding, snowball fight, snow angels or building a snowman?
It’s been a long time; I’d like to build a snowman.

Eggnog, hot chocolate, or hot cider?
Eggnog.

Candy canes or fruit cake?
Fruit cake. I like fruit cake.

Favorite holiday cookie: frosted sugar cutout, gingerbread, date-nut, or other?
Frosted sugar cutout.

NewMexiKen believes it is much better to receive than to give, so I won’t pass this meme along to anyone in particular. All bloggers are welcome to give it a try and let us know (in the comments) that you did. Happy Holidays.

‘Tis the season to be Googling, Fa La La La La

Google has a page dedicated to searching and browsing mail-order catalogs online.

Rather go to the movies? Google has a page where you can type in your zip code and get all the Movie Showtimes in the area.

Or there’s the new Google Base, which some say will be a combination eBay, Craigslist and classified ads from the newspaper (though too new to be those things yet).