Happy Thanksgiving

It's often said that becoming parents keeps you young. I get how this relates to giving you a reason to sit on the floor and play with toys you'd left behind in your forgotten youth, but over time I've found that there is another, a far deeper, meaning to the saying; mainly, becoming a parent has given me a second chance to learn the many things that were once vanquished to youthful lessons. This is true about many things, but has become particularly more obvious over the past month as I've tried to talk to Calvin about Thanksgiving. Sure, it seems rather mundane, and as I pulled our traditional Thanksgiving decor out of hiding I thought nothing could be simpler than a holiday about giving thanks, but when you really think about it, what is Thanksgiving? Is it a holiday about national heritage? Is it about religion? Or is it simply an ancient festival?

There are probably arguments for all of the above. I have vivid memories, boosted in color perhaps by the pictures I have in albums, of wearing a pilgrim costume and reciting a poem in front of my entire school as a first grader more years ago than I care to remember. Some years later I remember attending a full formal Thanksgiving dinner in the school auditorium, a meal laid out in careful preparation by parents and teachers and meant as a lesson in manners and thankfulness for the fourth and fifth grade classes. Who doesn't remember making hand tracings into turkeys or reading books about the voyage on the Mayflower and the strict life style of the Pilgrims who survived it? Put all these things together and what you get is a confusing conglomerate of a holiday, and that's what, after attempting to teach Calvin about the holiday of the month, has left me groping for an understanding that, as a child, I was sure I already possessed.

As an Americentric holiday Thanksgiving kind of fails. As children we were taught that this particular holiday was in celebration of that first feast, shared in the seventeenth century between the Pilgrims, who had landed in the dead of winter and nearly gone extinct, and the Native Americans who had saved their necks the following year by showing them how to grow food in the so-called new world. This, however, is a history I am loath to champion without also mentioning the fantastical way the generations to come returned the favor by taking control of the land they once knew not at all how to master. I also find it difficult to teach as a religious holiday, and don't believe it was ever meant to be one, other than through its relation to the Pilgrims and their religious fanaticism that mostly petered out long ago. So that leaves us with the ancient harvest festival option; many cultures have celebrated their fall bounties with harvest celebrations that date back into unrecorded time, and this would seem like a pretty good fit if it weren't for my seeming inability to give up on the "Pilgrims and Indians" lesson just yet; after all, it's an important lesson and needs to be inserted somewhere.

And so my cogitating has brought me full circle. I've spent many a moment pondering the importance of each aspect of the holiday that kicks off the Christmas season every year (for me, anyhow—for the stores that holiday is probably Halloween), and the only thing I feel certain of is that Thanksgiving is really just a big melting pot of a holiday, not unlike the nation to which it belongs. Certainly that at least gives us leave to use the felt Pilgrims and Native Americans we assembled earlier this month to go with the Thanksgiving book by Flanagan. I certainly know more about the history of the holiday than I did when I first started this process a month ago, but don't have any better a grasp on how to teach its meaning to my son. It's a disappointing and rather lacking conclusion, and maybe that's why I'm only just now discovering it as an adult. But, with black Friday sales just a few hours away, it's time to close the book on this holiday and move on to the next, much less confusing, holiday, the one with evergreen trees in homes and a magical man in red who flies with deer and delivers gifts to children on the birth day of a child who wasn't actually born on that day. Nope, not confusing at all.

Thanksgiving crafts

We've been busy with our paints, stamps, papers and glue gun this week. Crafts, like baking, are a favorite part of the holidays for me, and now that Calvin is old enough to really take part it's kind of like a license to go crazy. I think the handprint turkey is my favorite. I've been wanting to do that one since the kid was born.

I'm not the greatest artist myself, but a quick Google image search for Thanksgiving coloring pages produced a number of iconographic salutes to run off for more Crayola usage. We colored these, then I used two of them as starting points to make larger outline drawings of a turkey and a cornucopia on newsprint, which we promptly painted over, some of us more thickly than others. I love the smell of art room paint almost as much as that of paste, and it's a good thing, too.

Our felt counting turkey, complete with song (think something like Five Little Speckled Frogs, only with turkey feathers and, oh nevermind).

And the Thanksgiving icons we made to go with Calvin's Thanksgiving book (the one I reviewed a bit here). I did most of the cutting on these guys, and all of the glue gun handling, but Calvin helped stick some of the pieces together. (In case you're wondering, that's a harvest moon...)

Thanksgiving, by Alice Flanagan (review)

We have always used books to prepare Calvin for upcoming events. When his two year old check-up was right around the corner we borrowed a handful of books about visiting the doctor, and when we thought we were going to start potty training we brought home books about that (and triumphantly returned them when it became a moot point). But my favorite events are holidays, and those are some of my favorite books, too. The trick has been finding age appropriate books that are actually about the holidays, as opposed to just stories around the holidays. It was at Halloween last year that we first discovered Alice Flanagan's Holidays & Festivals series, and we really enjoyed it, so when we found the entire eight book collection used online this fall we bought it (Halloween is missing from the picture below because Calvin was reading it).

There are pros and cons with the series. Each book contains a lot of information, so when we read them to Calvin last year we read only portions at a time, and, while written with a fun voice, the books are strictly factual, so they may not be for all toddlers. But we love that she covers the history of the holidays, and the different celebrations as they are observed around the world. The Thanksgiving book, for instance, talks first about the first harvest celebrations all over, then she goes on to explain Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and "Indians," and from there the process by which the holiday became nationally recognized. I struggle with reading "Indian" each time, and with the lack of attention given to the Native Americans' situation (mention is given, in the current celebrations section, to the fact that many of the Wampanoag refuse to celebrate today and why), but the book is both factual and intriguing; it has certainly started us cogitating on what exactly Thanksgiving has us celebrating.

Calvin loves that this book is written in chapters, and he loves reading about the Native Americans (Flanagan also has a number of books on individual tribes, but we have yet to take a look at those). I love the history, and the book's factual basis. We only just got the books this fall, and of the two we've read so far Halloween is my favorite, and I think Calvin agrees, but Thanksgiving is fun, too. We'll let you know how Christmas is when we crack it open, but I won't let us do anything Christmas until after Thanksgiving has passed. It's a house rule.

Looking for fall

Calvin and I have a rule over the winter that, as long as the temperature is above the single digits, we have to spend at least fifteen minutes out of doors every day. I say a winter rule because getting outside during the summer is never a battle as long as we're not in the middle of a torrential downpour. But in the winter, with the days foreshortened and the earth put on ice, it's a lot harder to bring ourselves to leave the warmth of our cozy home to get the fresh air we really need.

Today marked the first day this year that I would rather have stayed curled up on the window seat and left the out of doors to the birds on our feeders, but we followed our own rule and headed outside anyhow. After lunch we donned our jackets and hats and trudged out into the chilly November air in search of fall.

Since it's actually almost winter, fall was a little hard to find; most of the leaves are gone from the trees, and even from the ground as well. Instead we were surprised to find a bit of leftover summer in the form of little blooming wild flowers, the ones that look like miniature daisies, scattered throughout the vacant lots in our neighborhood.

There is no better classroom than the out of doors. Rousseau, I am sure, would agree. We counted flowers. We dropped sticks into the sewer to watch the water ripple and obscure our reflections. We identified birds by their calls and their colors. We made footprints in a field of mud and compared the patterns left by our shoes to each other and to the wheel tracks left by the house building equipment that had left, it seemed, only recently. And we ended our walk at the park with fifteen minutes of intense physical education (a three year old repeatedly climbing ladders on a play structure means a good afternoon nap, after all).

And then, on the way home, we found our way inside a tree, and stayed for a little while. (and then we went home and took that good, long nap on a chilly afternoon).

Puppet theater

Our new library, now three quarters of a year old, is fantastic. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, in addition to our infatuation with the children's librarian there, but it's such a large part of our life that I imagine it warrants another mention. We can be found at our library several times a week—sometimes at a story time, sometimes at a children's event, and sometimes just for some good old fashioned mulling about. After all, if we aim our mulling for just the right time we're likely to see a passenger train zip by, and if we're lucky we are sometimes treated to a roaring freight train, too. My only gripe with the library is the plethora of toys scattered throughout the children's area; I've always made it a rule that we forsake these toys, the likes of which we have at home, and immerse ourselves in the scads of literary fun that we doesn't live where we do. In the new library, though, I've had to rethink that practice all for the love of the rather attractive puppet theater they put in.

We don't, after all, have a puppet theater at home (yet), so acting out books and songs while crouching behind a short wooden stage (or not bothering to take such steps to hide, if you're Calvin) is now a part of our regularly scheduled library program, brought to you by childhood imagination in a shroud of giggling glee.