Tuesday, November 2, 2010

Thanksgiving As I Remember It
























































Every November when I was in elementary school the teacher and her aide would put up a fall display on the cork-board, featuring not only Thanksgiving imagery but things like autumn leaves, corn shocks, and squirrels. I managed to track down some pictures of these and present them here as things that evoke some of my strongest memories of Thanksgiving. These were the days when the holiday still had a slight air of reverence and formality about it; if you didn't actually dress up for it, you still wore better clothes than usual. This was before "turkey day" turned into a sort of bilious belch between Halloween and Christmas. Most of these cut-outs were made by a company called Dennison.

4 comments:

Babel said...

Yep-the unfortunate (for non-fans) melding of Thanksgiving and football kinda took the focus away from, oh, I don't know-GOD!

Brer said...

That one turkey looks really mad--I think he suspects something.

And can anything possibly be a luscious as those grapes in the cornucopias look?

AlanDP said...

A couple of things...

In the early days of our marriage, Sandy and I went to Corpus and saw the replica Columbus ships that were there at the time. I walked into the middle of the deck of the Santa Maria and could just about have spit to either end of the ship. I asked the guide if they were full scale, and she said that they didn't have any exact plans of the Nina and Pinta, but they knew they were smaller than the Santa Maria. They did, however, have exact plans for the type of ship that the Santa Maria was. That thing was tiny! I would have been nervous just crossing the bay in that thing. Pictures like this always make them out to be much larger than they really were.

That last squirrel looks totally insane. Brings back some memories, though.

Brer said...

The Wikipedia article says the Mayflower was likely about 90 to 110 feet long and about 25 feet wide.

Don't touch that squirrel's nuts!