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EDITOR’S NOTE: Tell us your stories … please share your best (and worst, silliest, amazing and more) stories from the Thanksgiving holiday. Special dishes that only make an appearance at Thanksgiving. The Pioneer is all about collecting and preserving the stories from our elders.
Send your stories to editor@tillamookcountypioneer.net and watch for a series that features “Tell Us Your Stories.”
By Linda Shaffer
Well of course, the Broccoli Forest is a Thanksgiving memory and a dandy one. You’ve got some of those memories too, and this is the best year I can remember to unpack them. If you tell me that you aren’t a fan of this holiday and have never celebrated it, I’ll try to believe you but I won’t understand. If you’ve celebrated it all your life and attempt to me you don’t have any great stories to tell about this holiday, I’ll know your pants will catch on fire.
The main reason most of us love Thanksgiving is that it’s an American quilt filled with family and food and our very own personal history. Ancestors and their traditions are a big part of this for many of us. There are memories of past gatherings filled with people and things we love and some that we don’t, but they are woven together with thread from our lives. Filled with colorful sights and smells, epicurean adventures and laughter, those memories are different and the same for us all. OK, maybe some tears but you’ve got those stories and they are worthy. They deserve to be shared.
The thing about getting old is that you become a vault of important information, and you don’t even know it. Who says it’s important? Me. If you have funny family stories to tell, you’d best get to telling. Why? You are living history. Your 50ish year-old kids and 24ish year-old grandkids may not know these stories. Many of our grandparents and parents were story tellers and we were gifted with those stories. Now it’s time to pay up. If you can’t get an audience for your stories, you should start writing them down. I am sad that I did not record the personal stories I was told by my ancestors. Retrieving history is one thing. A first-person account of a wagon train crossing from a family member is something else.
I love Thanksgiving. I have loved it since I could be part of it. I loved to plan and shop and cook. I loved to bake and bake again because the first pie got eaten. I took great joy in little pickle relish plate thingies with olives. I loved the complexity of multi-layered Jello molds. It’s a good thing they didn’t have Charcuterie boards back then when I was making dinner or we wouldn’t have been able to afford the turkey.
Yes, you knew we’d get here. The Broccoli Forest is one of my all-time favorite Thanksgiving memories. This was a meal like something out of a movie. It was to feed four (4) people. That included our dearest friends, Mary and Scotty, Mr. S and I. We can say that pretty much any project Mary and I entered would get out of control and this was a fine example. I think the trouble started when she bought a new vegetarian cookbook. I’ll lay the blame there because she’s in Heaven and can’t slap me upside the head. At least I hope not. Mary hated broccoli. The rest of us loved the stuff.
Determined to overcome her “stinky green thing” issue, she presented us with a beautiful casserole dish filled with a bright green Broccoli Forest in full display on a bed of brown rice. I may have seen a deer run through it. There was so much food that day that we had to set up the card table to hold all of it but nothing compared…or ever will…to the Broccoli Forest. How do you be the first one to serve yourself from a work of art? It wasn’t easy but three of us had a serving of the forest and it was good. It was healthy too, but we were young and really didn’t care much about that at the time.
After eating enough for twice as many people and suffering from an overload of Tryptophan, we needed to smoke an after-dinner cigarette. We had convinced ourselves that we were going to walk on the beach. The smoking took place on our deck which won a vote as “close enough to the beach.” Of course, in those days we smoked in the house, too. We just felt like the deck was closer to the great outdoors.
To my knowledge, The Broccoli Forest was never to be seen again after it left my refrigerator. You can’t re-create the Mona Lisa and I don’t think Mary made it again. However, she did make the best broccoli salad I’ve ever had in my life and she did it on purpose to please those of us who loved the green thing. What a woman. She is my best Thanksgiving memory this year as is that day the four of us spent together. There are lots more … keep telling the stories.
Have a lovely holiday week my friends.
