280 animal, vegetable, miracleweeks. To a fourth- grader that sounds roughly the same as life without
parole.
“But you’ll still be earning real money from all your other customers,” I
pointed out. “You’ll be opening a bank account before you know it. And
everybody’s going to need extra eggs for our baking, with the holidays
coming up.”
Cheered by the prospect of holiday baking, the Corporate Executive
Officer took the situation in hand. As far as I know, the workforce was
never apprised of the crisis.
/
Of all holidays we celebrate in the United States, few come with food
traditions that are really our own. Most of the holy days and bank holidays
on our calendar have come from other cultures, some of them ancient,
others too modern to have settled yet into having their own menus. The
only red- blooded American holiday food customs, it seems to me, arrive
on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.
They couldn’t be more different. The fi rst is all about charring things
on a grill, burgers and hot dogs and the like, washed down with plenty of
beer or soda, the purpose being to stay outdoors for a long afternoon cul-
minating at dusk in elaborate explosions of gunpowder. Aside from the
flagpole that may be somewhere in the scene, there is nothing about this
picnic that’s really rooted in our land. The pyrotechnics are Chinese,
technically, and the rest of the deal is as packaged as food can be. That
might even be what’s most American about it. At the end of a Fourth of
July party, if asked to name the sources of what we’d consumed, we’d be
hard pressed to muster an ingredient list.
The other holiday is all about what North America has to offer at the
end of a good growing season. Thanksgiving is my favorite, and always has
been, I suppose because as a child of the farmlands I appreciate how it
honestly belongs to us. On Saint Patrick’s Day every beer- drinking soul
and his brother is suddenly Irish. Christmas music fills our ears with tales
of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch
dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree... I think. But Turkey
Day belongs to my people. Turkeys have walked wild on this continent