THE HUKA L. NEW-YORKER 
1405 
Pastoral Parson on the Lonely Road 
Thanksgiving on the Farm 
By Rev. Geo. B. Gilbert 
“Thanksgiving Is Old Folks’ Day.” 
—That is what Henry Ward Beecher 
used to say. Christmas is the children’s 
day, Easter is the young folks’ day, but 
Thanksgiving is old folks’ day. The 
more the Pastoral Parson thinks of it the 
more he likes this division, especially as 
to Christmas and Thanksgiving. What 
a lot of work and worry and trouble and 
expense we would escape if we would 
really let Christmas be children’s day. I 
must say a word about this, as my next 
letter w r ill not get to you till your Christ¬ 
mas worry is over. Really that is what 
it has become to many—a worry and 
dread. Why not have the courage to tell 
our grown-up friends and relations that 
this year we are going to put all our 
Christmas effort into cheer for children, 
both about us and abroad? The thought 
of those little orphan children wandering 
about the fields in Servia has just about 
made the Pastoral Parson sick. I wish 
all the New-Yorker children could do 
something for them. Isn’t it really a 
matter of swapping with many of our 
gifts to grown ups? “You haven’t given 
me a present for three years,” I heard a 
young woman sister say to her grown-up 
brother. (They were both well-to-do.) 
“Is that so?” said he. “Well, you just 
figure out about how much I’m in debt 
to you on this matter and we'll settle 
up.” So they talked it over, and he paid 
her twenty-seven dollars! This was an 
extreme case, but the spirit of much of 
our giving is the same. There is so much 
sorrow in the world this year that there 
is no room for that kind now. 
Thanksgiving and Old Folks. —I do 
think the grown-ups and old folks enjoy 
Thanksgiving immensely. Some one of 
the relation circle “makes Thanksgiving 
this year,” and the families set out right 
after morning chores. Before dinner is 
ready the men folks take a turn about 
the farm. I like to see men walking over 
a farm just to talk over the land and 
crops just gathered. Which crops did 
the best? Wherein could others have 
been improved? What does the soil need? 
Then they swing around toward the barn. 
The porkers and their feeding take up 
some time and the comparative qualities 
of dent and flint corn take up a full half 
hour. Then the men folks stray to the 
stable and are there lost till dinner time. 
The Women Folks. —The women 
folks are seasoning the dinner with much 
talk, and good healthy talk it is. I have 
no patience with those who think women 
can’t visit with its being gossip. They 
reminisce more than the men. They 
talk of the old-time gatherings and of the 
wonderful pies that Aunt Mary and 
Grandmother Smith used to make. This 
brings them down to the new dishes they 
have found out this year and a general 
swapping of recipes. What kindlier 
sight then this half circle of gray hairs 
visiting in the roomy farmhouse kitchen, 
surrounded by the savor of roasting fowl 
while the younger women are bustling 
about the table! 
A Neighborhood Thanksgiving.—I 
must tell you how much -we enjoy our 
neighborhood Thanksgiving ’way down 
country in our little country church. 
The Pastoral Parson’s family has not 
a relative within 200 miles, and he just 
cannot make a dinner of just hi9 own 
household into a Thanksgiving dinner. 
The memory of the old days on the old 
home farm when Uncle Charles used to 
drive over from town with a two-horse 
livery team and his whole family, makes it 
impossible. Neither fowls nor vegetables, 
no, not even turkey and cranberry sauce, 
in themselves, make up a Thanksgiving 
dinner. There must be a big table full 
of folks—family folks, neighborhood folks, 
church folks or acquaintanceship folks. 
Last year down in the church we had all 
the sawmill folks come down. Do you 
live near a school or a college? Are there 
not those around us who cannot go home 
or who have no home to go to? They 
will help make you up a big table ftjll. 
Every one brings to our neighborhood 
dinner whatever they were minded to 
have at home and no one gets much of 
their own food. It’s nothing against your 
own cooking that other folks’ cooking 
tastes so good. There is a novelty and a 
change about it. There will be service in 
the church, with much singing, in the 
forenoon and a football game for the men 
folks after the dinner. We are espe¬ 
cially inviting any newcomers to the din¬ 
ner this year. Are there not new families 
in your neighborhood? Why not intro¬ 
duce them to this grand old New England 
day by having them in a body at your 
house! 
The Dinner Itself.—I take it that it 
isn’t the amount that one has on this day 
Mrs Geo. B. Gilbert. 
as much as it is that we have on the 
table various samples, as it were, of all 
the good things God has given us. Have 
just as many different kinds of vegetables 
as possible. Thrice happy are we who 
can gather and eat of the fruit of our 
own soil and the labor of our own hands. 
As we look over the table each dish be¬ 
gins its story for us, bringing back the 
experiences of our Summer’s work. The 
things on the Pastoral Parson’s table will 
have much to say to him and the three 
boys. The potato dish declares it would 
have been far better with a fine yield if 
we had put on the Bordeaux mixture 
Rev. Geo. B. Gilbert, the Pastoral Parson 
much sooner and not waited till it was 
almost time for the blight which came 
with a vengeance in a long hot spell of 
rain. The carrots say that it is none of 
our fault that they are there ac all.” We 
were put in the ground outrageously late 
and when the boys went over to cultivate 
the garden, they tore us all up by the 
roots, not knowing where we were. But 
it rained for a week, you know, your oats 
were out, and we took root again and 
made a fair yield.” Oh, don’t hurry this 
meal of all meals; we can enjoy it so 
much. The turnips od that day cannot 
reproach us. We have over a hundred 
bushels and such a fine lot to give away. 
Last year we kept about eight families 
supplied, places where we often eat on our 
long trips, and this year we can supply 
twice as many. We put them in barrels 
and then pour sand over them. Then 
there is the rooster right in the middle 
of* the platter! The boys and I have had 
our eye on him all Summer—the biggest 
and fattest of the lot. In my morning’s 
paper to-day it told about the high price 
of turkeys this year. But what is that to 
us, thought I. 
In place of cranberry sauce with our 
dinner, the boys and I, if we were to eat 
at home, would have a relish all our own, 
and that is sweet cider. What a day 
that was on the old home farm, when 
father waited till Saturday and took us 
boys along to the cider mill with him! 
How we ate apples all the way down and 
sucked cider all the way back! Because 
sour cider is such miserable stuff, should 
we farm folks be deprived of that rarest 
beverage, which city people never really 
know, sweet cider? So each year the 
boys and I, with old Doll, jog over to the 
mill, eating apples all the way over and 
pretty nearly drinking sweet cider all 
the way back. Then we built a fire in 
the old cook stove back of the barn, 
washed out the root beer bottles in the 
brook, boiled the cider in big kettles for 
a few minutes, and then bottled it up hot 
and tight. “How long will it keep sweet 
that way?” said a passer-by. “Till we 
drink it up,” said I. 
The Boys On That Day. —I have 
just got one word to say in behalf of the 
boys that day and I want every boy to 
read it arid remind his mother of it. 
Don’t have the dinner so late that the 
boys are most dead before you let them 
in the house to get ready. The agony of 
a hoy with a long since empty stomach 
getting whiffs of roast rooster as the 
women folks emerge to yell for more 
wood, augmented by the sight of pumpkin 
pies cooling in the pantry window, is be¬ 
yond words to describe. If you must 
have dinner late (so as not to have to 
have any supper) then pass out plenty of 
apples and bread to the boys at the first 
inquiry if “dinner isn’t most ready.” 
Growing. Gray Gracefully. — With 
the Fall holidays and New Years coming 
on we, that are on the other side of forty, 
realize again that we are not what we 
used to be and cannot fly round with the 
chores or smash through the housework 
as we would like to. And instead of 
spending all our spare time in handing 
out advice to those younger (advice given 
to us and never used!) it might be well 
to look a little to ourselves. Are we 
growing “hard to get along with”? 
Father is getting old, you know, and of 
course, “hard to get along with.” Mother 
is getting along in years now, and as we 
must expect growing “hard to get along 
with.” Uncle John is with us now and 
as you know quite well along in years 
and so “hard to get along with.” The 
pity of it! Shall all our years of expe¬ 
rience bear only the fruit of frettiness 
and trouble? Shall hardening of temper 
and hardening of arteries go together? 
Shall our boy fear to tell his bride that 
he supposes he will have to have his 
father live with him? Shall we be for¬ 
ever cackling of the things we used to do? 
In fact, shall we drop behind in the great 
procession or shall we keep up and live in 
the present? I heard some one say: “A 
man can make an office great, but an 
office never made a man great.” With 
the mellow ripeness of the years upon us, 
let ns plan now to make the time of our 
advancing years great by making it easy 
for all and hard for none. 
Wiiat the Pastoral Parson is 
Thankful For. —When the first long 
winter of'the Pilgrim Fathers had passed, 
fifty-one of the original settlers had died 
and yet that very Fall Governor Brad¬ 
ford appointed a Day of Thanksgiving 
because of the harvest from their twenty- 
six acres of land. We might well ponder 
on that first year at Plymouth when we 
get blue and discouraged. What if half 
of our family of Rural New-Yorker 
folk had died within a year! How in¬ 
teresting it would have been to have gone 
through those seven cellars of those seven 
first houses built that year and to have 
seen what they had stored away. No 
doubt they were much like the things in 
out* cellars now, and over which we keep 
the day. For Thanksgiving has to do 
primarily with good crops and the abun¬ 
dant harvest God has given us. Just now 
alter pouring three bushels of turnips 
into a neighbor’s wagon to exchange for 
raspberry plants next Spring, I took him 
down cellar and it was about all we could 
do *to get around. What with potatoes 
and turnips and onions and cabbages and 
canned fruit and that bottled sweet cider 
it will not hold much more. I suppose 
people with no cellars and no barns will 
have a real Thanksgiving, but it cannot 
be like ours. For we who toil hand in 
hand with God to bring forth food for 
His children to eat, feel in our hearts 
that real Thanksgiving which has a savor 
all our own. Let the head of the house 
sit at the head of the table responsible 
for the souls and lives about him, en¬ 
trusted to his care. The first fruits of his 
land and the firstlings of his flock are 
upon it and well may be lift up his voice 
and say: 
The eyes of all wait upon Thee, O 
Lord. 
Ans. And Thou givest them their 
meat in due season. 
Thou openest Thine hand. 
Ans. And fillest all things living with 
plenteousness. Bless, O Lord, this, Thy 
bounty, to our use and us to thy love 
and faithful service. And make us mind¬ 
ful of the needs of others. Amen. 
Try Organizing a Woman’s Club. 
Mrs. D. B. P., who writes from Ten¬ 
nessee, on page 1250, of running from 
one task to another, may find an answer 
to her question “Where is the remedy?” 
in the experience of a Michigan woman. 
Let her invite all of her neighbors to 
the number of 10 to 20 to meet at 
hqr home on the following Tuesday (do 
this at once—“delays are dangerous,” 
you know) from 2 p. m. till 5, and at 4 
p. m. serve tea and sandwiches, coffee 
and cake or fruit and candy—just some¬ 
thing to take off that distant rigid feel¬ 
ing. Talk over organizing a little neigh¬ 
borhood club, and ask some one to volun¬ 
teer to ask the same crowd for the next 
Tuesday. Tell them to bring babies and 
sewing. Ask each one to avoid gossip 
or disheartening news, but talk about 
common interests. Elect a president and 
secretary, and have roll call answered 
to by recipes, poems, news items, or a 
souvenir postal passed around and dis¬ 
cussed. 
The writer has started two such clubs 
among farm women and it can be done 
anywhere, I believe. It breaks the 
wearisomeness of life and makes us bet¬ 
ter wives and mothers. I, and I speak 
for many—get into nagging, fault-finding 
habits if I run from one task to another 
with no pleasure in sight, and that, you 
know, drives men and boys out of the 
house and away perhaps. So let us farm 
women feel we are benefiting our own 
families by getting out regularly and 
brushing up against other personalities. 
I find I do just as much on club days 
as any other, for I work with a brisk 
heartiness and come home fresher and 
with new ideas. 
It is not how much work we ac¬ 
complish now, my Tennessee sister, but 
how much we save ourselves for our hus¬ 
bands and children in the future years. 
You, dear mother, are the most priceless 
thing under your roof. Rest every day. 
Save fruit for Winter, but save yourself 
first. Mothers cannot be replaced. In 
my small neighborhood five men have 
married second wives. Does it not look as 
though women were dropping into early 
graves? Men are thoughtless and many 
wives by their unselfishness are helping 
them to become more and more so. We 
must be thinking of our children need¬ 
ing us a few years hence, as well as 
now. A MICHIGAN WOMAN. 
Too Much Jewelry. 
A TiARiT which some college girls have 
and which is not in good taste is that of 
wearing too much jewelry to school. It 
is true that some girls are afraid to leave 
their best jewelry in their rooms for fear 
of its being stolen, but surely they can 
leave it somewhere—do something with it 
so that they need not wear it to school to 
take care of it. 
That is from Mrs. Birdsall of the Kan¬ 
sas Agricultural College. Why limit it to 
school? As nearly as we can make out 
the “over-jewelry” habit comes down from 
the old savage custom of advertising the 
spoils of war. The man started it and 
used the woman to display his surplus 
wealth. Man has been obliged to get 
away from the habit ahead of woman. 
