We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I see this morning that, during the night, Mrs. BD & Co. produced three punkin pies (from fresh pumpkins and homemade crust) and two pecan pies. Nice. My job this morning? Making stuffing (cornbread with sausage, onion and celery) and grilling the turkeys. Then the friendly Indians will arrive bearing their goodies after their annual TG 10 K race. I say they are nuts but they all blame me for introducing them to the running habit which I did, years ago. I quit that when my 3rd kid was born. It did not feel right to disappear for two hours every weekend morning with three little kids around.
Basting is a waste of time, the stuff just runs off the skin. With my frightening horse-sized hypodermic needle, I am injecting cider into the birds this year. Breasts, legs, wings, and under the skin. Once in the beginning, again when half-done. They are not Butterball, just plain fresh turkeys. One is 20 lbs and one is 26 lbs. That's a big turkey. Good leftovers for all. On the grill, I have plain charcoal and I am keeping some oak and apple logs burning and smoking on top of the charcoal. Nice smelling smoke wafting around for a country mile, as light snow falls. That's Yankeeland Thanksgiving. And the Indian Pudding is in the oven.
For a dumb reason, I did brine one of them for 24 hrs. in a ton of herbs and spices and wine, etc. but it really is not worth the trouble. Just inject them with liquids - sherry, white wine, cider, brandy, beer, or anything. You can add herbs, melted butter, whatever. It's a man's job, cooking meat and game. And mashing the taters with cream cheese, butter, sour cream, and heavy cream. Taste while doing to make sure you added enough pepper and to keep your strength up.
It's wonderful to see how regionally-diverse this big nation of America remains, but I would not touch some of that stuff. I mean, Snickers Salad for Thanksgiving? Sheesh! Nothing against Snickers but oh, well, it's all good as long as we are grateful. I don't want to be a food snob, but, gee whiz, there are some limits!
Pic is my standard Yankeeland cooking. I use half the sugar, twice the berries. My mother in law always makes raw cranberry and orange relish - deliciously tangy and different from this.
I am thankful to those who contribute to Maggie's, and to all those who contribute links for our morning link dump. Besides randomly-interesting stuff, we like to link views and info which are neglected by the MSM.
Also, a thanks to other sites which we frequently neglect or forget to acknowledge as link sources - sites like RCP, Hot Air, Insty, Lucianne, Drudge, Vanderleun, and others. Thanks to y'all for your work.
We wish a Happy, thankful, and blessed American Thanksgiving to all of our readers and friends of all nations, creeds, colors, shapes, sizes, gender identifications, and cultures across our fruited plain and across the world.
The fact is, broken families and a culture that produces feral children are at the root of the vast majority of the crime and poverty and violence that plagues our nation. Not racism. Not the militarization or the overreaction of police. Not any of that. Broken families. A valueless culture. A vacuum of values, into which anything can move and take hold.
You truly can’t fool all of the people all of the time, and thanks to Gruber, the time of trusting liberals is drawing to a close. This is wonderful. Look, we conservatives always knew these clowns were pushing Marxy snake oil on a gullible electorate. Now, the truth is impossible to hide. It’s right there on video, and it’s Gruberiffic.
(Peggy Noonan) often gets to a certain point in understanding someone or something and then stops, refusing to open the door of the room she stands before, afraid to look inside. Or she opens it a crack, takes a tiny peek, and then slams it shut.
Showing respect for Islam, speaking reverentially of Islam, calling Islam a religion of peace is precisely the wrong tactic.
One does better to respond to terrorism with contempt and derision, with force where need be, but without respect. If Islamic terrorism degrades the character and reputation of all Muslims, then it is for Muslims to restore their good name and the good name of their religion.
It looks like we're down to only 20-25 (not counting rug rats) of friends and family for Thanksgiving this year at the Maggie's Farm HQ. Some of my sibs are doing TG at their new vacation house on Cape Cod, appropriately-enough.
The way we do it is like the Indians did: everybody brings part of the feast. We rent a few round or long tables with chairs to put in the parlor, light up a couple of fireplaces, decorate things a little, and warm up the grill.
Best holiday of the year - no presents, just festive get-together. No TV allowed, generally-speaking.
Our home team is, as usual, providing 2 turkeys, stuffing, gravy, wine and beer, green salad, and Mrs. BD's pumpkin pies and Indian Pudding. Oh, and whipped cream. Soup is just too much trouble. Guests are bringing apple pies and ice cream, grilled brussel sprouts, pickled beets, sweet potatoes, mashed taters, mashed rutabaga, roasted parsnips, cranberry relish, champagne and Martinelli's, and hors d'oevres.
Low-carb, fat-free, vegan, and gluten free of course!
his
is what a Feminist looks like — The university system as The Village of
the Damned - See more at:
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=55603#sthash.bmzpIvSS.dpuf
According to Obama our immigration system is broken because it doesn’t allow illegal aliens who illegally crossed the border to take American jobs. That’s not a broken system, that’s what the system is supposed to do.
A very fine American state, Kentucky. But the guy left out gravy. They make serious gravy for grits or biscuits in Kentucky. I'd have it for any meal (but not that disgusting hot-dog gravy they like in coal country).
One historical detail I picked up in reading Philbrick's wonderful Mayflower is that the Pilgrims only permitted civil marriage ceremonies - no religion involved, and no preacher present.
As Calvinists, the Pilgrims/Puritans/Separatists of colonial New England viewed the Anglican sacraments as Papist, and thus representative of the Anti-Christ - and they meant it. As a consequence, Congregational Churches, the heirs of the Puritan movement, still have no sacraments per se, although many have liberalized (or backslided?) to the extent of doing baptism, communion - and, of course, weddings which, even if not technically sacramental, are viewed as sacred vows. People long for a touch of the sacred and sacramental.
It is fascinating to be reminded that our nation's deepest roots are in Calvinist theocracy: pre-enlightenment, for better or worse. They viewed the Indians as equals (though living in spiritual darkness), but they hung some Quakers in Boston as blasphemers (but mainly tried to just send them away).
They even hung an ancestor of mine, who ran away from her husband and kids in Kingston, Rhode Island and was caught on a trail outside of Boston, headed north. Her crime? She refused to return home. We suspect she was not overly fond of her husband, who had previously been suspected of throwing his first wife overboard on the way to Rhode Island in 1640.
I have been perusing this out of print book: Truro - Cape Cod, Landmarks and Seamarks by Shebnah Rich (1888). I have a copy of the book, and wonder how in the world it got online.
Cape Cod began growing in European (English) population around 1630.
Farming and fishing were the main occupations. The soil was rich then due to the old forests. Today, there is no topsoil left. By 1750 there were few trees left on the Cape due to lumbering, land clearing for farming, and for fuel. The scrub oak and pine that predominate today is not the tall virgin hardwood forest that the colonists encountered.
Everybody grew things and raised animals. There was not much cash except from fishing and boat-building, and there were no shops. Main subsistence crops: orchards, maize, pumpkin and squash, root vegetables, beans, rye. No wheat, no flour, no sugar unless very wealthy - but there was molasses from the West Indies. Also, pigs, steer, milk cows, chickens, and horses for transportation. Cranberries, raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries grew wild. There were plenty of deer and rabbits too, and of course abundant shellfish. Beans with a little pork was a standard meal. People baked their bread once a week, made of mixes of corn (maize) and rye flour. Food: Early American food and drink
When you slaughtered a hog or steer, you shared the meat with neighbors. They did the same.
You were allowed to shoot a wolf or a "problem Indian" but the Indians were not much of a problem and soon settled into Indiantowns and learned English. King Philip's War was not a big deal on Cape Cod.
A village Meeting House served many purposes including local government meetings and church. Most of the early congregations were "united," ie Methodist and Congregational worshipping together. In the early days there was a hot market for pastors and Harvard began grinding them out in 1636 to meet the demand. Like the Boston colonists, the Cape Codders were not Puritans like the Plymouth group.
Other than local rules made in town meetings, there was no "government" in evidence at all. Town officials were by vote, and volunteers. There were no police but there were informal militias. Every adult male citizen was required to own a firearm (mostly matchlocks). Later on, recruiters would pass through towns demanding recruits for the French and Indian War. The structure of grammar schooling varied widely from village to village.
Truancy from church was a crime. So was swearing. Sunday church services generally had two one-hour sermons and around an hour of prayer. The service was around four hours in all. No music, of course, and no communion. Those were Papist things. Each church had a guy assigned to wake up drowsers with a long stick with a feather on one end (for the ladies) and a knob on the other end (to conk the drowsy men on the head). A fun task, no doubt.
Thanksgiving: There were fall harvest Thanksgiving feasts all over the Cape. Nothing to do with the original Pilgrims, just a traditional harvest time thanks to God. The Pilgrim Thanksgiving? They had very little to be thankful for with half their group dead in that first winter, but they were anyway. Remember, they were headed for the already established town of New Amsterdam (New York), not Massachusetts. Got blown off course.
There were windmills all over the Cape, very early. Their main purposes were making corn or rye meal, or for filling up salt flats for salt production (to make salt cod).
Fishing meant mostly Cod on George's Bank, but later Mackeral too. Some guys were fishing schooner skippers by 25. Some of them went on to be transoceanic ship captains. There was some near-shore whaling, and the occasional stranding of a pod of Blackfish (aka Pilot Whales) was hitting the jackpot.
Alcohol: Cider.
Death: Mainly infectious diseases of early childhood. Some TB in young adulthood. Also, puerperal fever killed a lot of wives so men often went through a series of them. After that, fishermen drowning was the main cause - which provided widows for the widowers. If you escaped those things, most people lived into their 80s. (Those childhood death rates and accident death rates are what skews old-time life expectancy data and thus the averages are meaningless.)
Illumination and heat: Fireplaces for heat, and one in the kitchen for cooking. Wood stoves came much later. Bayberry candles, whale oil lamps.
Transportation, etc: Roads were terrible. Transportation was mainly by water and to be a town you needed a harbor. With its fine harbor, Provincetown was the largest on the Lower Cape. Early on, there was regular travel and mail, via Boston packets.
We might consider these settlers poor and deprived, but all they saw was abundance, faith, and hope. Life was hard and highly uncomfortable (by our standards), and was expected to be. You fended for yourself. If judged utterly helpless, the church came to your aid.
Housing: The history of colonial housing is an interesting one, mostly borrowed from England and from Holland in areas around New York. However, the rural Cape Cod cottage was an American invention and typical on colonial Cape Cod. No plumbing. Every village had an amateur post and beam carpenter in an era where most trades were amateur and everybody was a farmer, including schooner skippers, pastors, and doctors.
President Obama’s executive amnesty violates the laws Congress has passed in order to create and implement laws Congress has refused to pass. The President is providing an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants with social security numbers, photo IDs and work permits—allowing them to now take jobs directly from struggling Americans during a time of record immigration, low wages, and high joblessness.
This amnesty plan was rejected by the American people’s Congress. By refusing to carry out the laws of the United States in order to make his own, the President is endangering our entire Constitutional order.
There is no end to the oppression because the Victimocracy has to grow. America is always more bigoted than it was last year because the Victimocrats need more power this year. The more oppressed Americans become, the more they must be denounced for victimizing all the nice people running their lives and robbing them blind.
When I was a young lad I grabbed a beer at Max's Kansas City on Union Square during a late night ramble around the Village with some pals, and who comes in the door but Joplin and some band members (The Holding Company) after a show.
She pulls up a chair next to me at the bar and says "You're cute" then proceeds to ignore me and orders a few rounds of whiskeys for herself and the band. I do not know whether I was cute but she was not cute at all. They were all obviously drugged on something. I always thought Janis was a stoner suburban phoney. She could screech, though, and let it rip, which is not nothing.
It is legally interesting, but in my experience most atheists have faith in some thing or some things as a life foundation, mainly pagan or materialist sorts of things. In the US, most atheists live on a Christian foundation.
it's a good opportunity to catch up 
The Thanksgiving Recipes Googled in Every State - 
Mary has
The 12 Wildest Songs to be Played at the Benefit
Tyler Cowan's
