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Dear Reader,
A couple of years ago, author Keith Cronin wrote a Thanksgiving guest column that had me laughing out loud. I hope you enjoy reading it, too.
We are just days away from Thanksgiving here in the U.S., which means my family will soon be organizing its grocery lists, pulling out the cookware and getting ready to prepare the traditional Thanksgiving lobster.
No, that's not some auto-correct spelling anomaly: I said lobster, not turkey. Let me explain.
When my daughter was around ten years old, she came home from school one November day and announced that lobster had been one of the main courses for the Pilgrims' original Thanksgiving meal. This made sense, she observed, when you took into account the nearby North Atlantic waters. So she proposed that this year we try something different, yet still in keeping with Pilgrim tradition.
We all liked lobster, and her plan made sense, so we cheerfully agreed to celebrate the holiday that year with "the traditional Thanksgiving lobster." We had guests coming, so we made sure to set their expectations for a turkeyless meal. Our proposed menu raised some eyebrows, but nobody objected, and Project Lobster was soon underway.
The meal got off to a great start, and the lobster was delicious. The conversation around the dinner table frequently came back to what a great idea this was, and to wondering why we had never explored this tradition before. But midway through the meal we began to notice my daughter smirking enigmatically.
Finally she made a confession. She had made up the entire thing, fabricating a plausible but undocumented "tradition," hoping to convince us to cook lobster instead of turkey. Her rationale? "I just really don't like turkey," she said with a guilty smile.
We couldn't even get angry. After all, we had been enjoying the meal immensely. And darn it, it really was pretty likely that there was a lobster or two on the original Thanksgiving dinner table, so it was hard to impugn her logic. We all had a good laugh, although I did make a mental note to rev up the horsepower on my internal lie detector if ever my daughter offered me a questionable excuse for getting home late.
That was some fifteen years ago. But in testament to the lasting merit of my daughter's ingenuity, we still serve "the traditional Thanksgiving lobster" every year, sometimes accompanied by a token turkey for any dinner guests whose sense of "tradition" might be more restrictive than our own.
--Keith Cronin
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
* This month's Penguin Classics book is DEMIAN by Hermann Hesse. Start reading now and enter to win a Penguin bookbag. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/November13Classics
AUTHORBUZZ: AuthorBuzz authors are on vacation this week. Instead of writing, they'll be roasting turkeys and baking pies. They will be returning next week.
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