Ranee at Arabian Knits wrote:

> In article >,
> sf > wrote:
>
>
>>Some people eat earlier than later. I don't know why other than it's
>>their family's custom.
>
>
> We don't eat Thanksgiving dinner for breakfast. We have a brunch and
> then eat the big meal at dinner time.
>


Looking back on it, as a child i seem to recall us taking the holiday
meal a bit early, maybe 3 - 4 p.m. rather than the more regular dinner
at 5 - 6 pm.

As kids we were given the routine breakfast and the rest of the day any
of various foods brought by guests as well as made for the occasions of
a big family get together at the grand parents house or latter on my
own parents house.

I don't know what the grown men did, they didn't sit around the house
and watch t.v. because in those days, in that place we didn't have
indoor plumbing much less electricity. 1950's rural Oregon.

Though i remember one year we had this T'day dinner at a married sisters
farm and the grown men threw up a barn while waiting for dinner Had
it framed and roofed by days end. The brother in law and several of the
uncles put in the foundations the week previously.

Some would hunt, others do various work that had to be done on a daily
basis (cows, goats, pigs, chickens & etc.) & still found the time to
drive 20 miles to hang out at a local tavern before coming home to an
late afternoon dinner.

I can recall at my maternal grandmothers house a kind of out side,
sheltered porch sort of seating for some of the "adult" if not "Grown
Men" who arrived either late or too drunk to sit with the family at table.

*Sigh* memories .... on my first holiday leave from the military, in the
early 1970's i went upstairs to put on "good clothes" for t'day dinner
after hanging out most of the day in jeans and a sweat shirt. Only to
find all my civilian clothes mysteriously missing. THis elicited
various increasingly convoluted explanations from me mum as to laundry
and storage space and lack of time and just went back up stairs an put
on my Navy Blues as she fully intended from the first after i had
earlier dismissed her statement that i would be wearing my Dress Uniform
for dinner. SHe was actually able to trick me twice, the next time i
came home, i left my dress blues on base

But when we went to a local summertime celebration in the small Oregon
town i found i only had the Navy dress whites i had travelled to Oregon
in to wear, for all the same reasons but asserted more indifferently
--
JL