Patriotism, Thanksgiving - and Apple Sauce - 29 November 2002

Last Saturday afternoon, skimming the airwaves and impatient for the last golf tournament of this year, I came in on the end of a sentence which sounded more like a proclamation.

A professionally resonant television baritone declared: "And this day and this ceremony will become an annual national event."

From the tone of the announcer and the sight of a little girl with pigtails and a toothy grin I was afraid I was in on the initiation of yet one more so-called national day - as in Mother's Day, Father's Day, Love a Dog Day or any one of a score of other festivals concocted by enterprising businessmen well aware of the money value of popular sentiment or sentimentality.

Which made me give thanks for my late, beloved mother-in-law, a Southern lady of elegance and no-nonsense character who actually forbade her daughters to send Mother's Day greetings because she didn't want them to be the victims of what she called "a racket", started, as it was, by florists and the telegraph companies.

Well to much relief last Saturday's ceremony was not commercially inspired, or dictated, it was a legal ceremony started in California, which has, by now, spread to over 30 states.

What the tele was showing was a panorama of married couples, of every station and colour, sitting at a table in front of a judge to watch him sign and therefore legalise their adoption of the tot they were holding or kissing or shushing.

"From now on," announced the invisible baritone - on whose authority I don't know - "from now on this day will be known as National Adoption Day."

There are about a quarter of a million couples who are desperate to adopt a child.

But it can take years, the obstacles are many and for every honest couple there are wily people eager to exploit the immigration laws with fake passports, fake marriage certificates.

Anyway this scene was often hilarious due to the bored urbanity or the snoring or the protesting howls of the adoptee.

But one cameo I shall not forget. A large, bosomy black woman glowing with anticipation and the judge saying: "So I do now pronounce you the one and only legal parents of this child."

The woman collapsed in a flood of tears, buried her face, then came up and raised both arms to heaven.

But I am now talking to you about this past Thursday and the most sacrosanct of all American secular festivals and the most embracing since it doesn't matter whether you're a Christian, Muslim, Shinto or a heathen - a day which everybody takes off by order of the President of the United States no less, which cannot be said of Christmas Day, Yom Kippur, Ramadan or even the first day of the World Series baseball championship.

A Thanksgiving ceremony goes back to 1622 when it was proclaimed by a 33-year-old Yorkshireman, William Bradford, who was then the governor of the colony which had been set up at Plymouth, on Cape Cod, a sand spit curling off the coast of Massachusetts.

The colony was two years old when it had a good harvest and Bradford said they should all celebrate by falling on their knees and "blessing the God of Heaven who had brought us over the vast and furious ocean, delivered us from the perils and miseries thereof to set our feet on the firm and stable earth".

This was no colourful rhetoric.

They'd meant to follow the first settlers to Virginia - which a poet who'd never been there, said was Earth's only paradise, but storms held them off its coast and with some deliberation they tacked about and hoped to find some place about Hudson's River.

But that prospect was worse.

"We fell amongst dangerous shoals and roaring breakers and got entangled in great danger."

They outrode the storm, hugged the coast north and finally about 400 miles north of their object, landed on Cape Cod.

The first Thanksgiving was no feast. The Puritans were against feasting of any kind.

But one has to imagine them singing hymns, bent in prayer and thanking God for the two novelties they had never seen which would sustain them.

One was a clucking animal that came leaping out of the cranberry bogs that spread over the Cape.

The turkey was new, so was the cranberry. What better then than to slaughter and roast one, make a sauce of the other, and serve them together.

And that indeed is the base of - I should say - 90% of the Thanksgiving family dinners served last Thursday - I allow 10% for vegetarians.

Soon was added another novelty - the potato, and the more familiar plump orange sphere, about which an early colonist wrote: "Let no man make jest of pumpkins, since for with this fruit the Lord was pleased to feed his people till came corn and cattle."

Well about a decade later most of the New England colonies took up the practice of an annual Thanksgiving after harvest but the idea did not catch on in the expanding nation until Lincoln, with the end of the Civil War in sight, proclaimed a national day of Thanksgiving - with no binding powers however, on any state that cared to skip it.

But Thanksgiving as we know it today, a festival to celebrate the pilgrims' first harvest and all the blessings that have flown from it, did not really take on until Franklin Roosevelt, after the anxiety-ridden late summer of 1938 - Hitler had taken Austria and was about to conquer Czechoslovakia, then came the Munich false peace, cheered throughout Britain as an act of salvation, while the solitary figure of Churchill in the House of Commons barked: "We have suffered an unmitigated defeat."

Those unhappy days were green in the memory of Europeans and Americans alike when, on 19 November 1938, President Roosevelt took to the radio, as he did on all occasions he considered of national gravity.

It's hard now to recall before television the emotional impact of Roosevelt, who was, more than any president before or since, a superb - that is to say - a proud, commanding broadcaster.

And on 19 November he began: "I Franklin D Roosevelt, President of the United States, do hereby designate Thursday 24 November 1938 as a day of general Thanksgiving."

He at once set the annual tone with this: "Our fathers set aside such a day as they hued a nation from the primeval forest."

Well never mind that there was hardly a gorse bush on the barren sand strip of Cape Cod, there were lots of forests across 3,000 miles of the mainland.

"From our earliest recorded history Americans have thanked God for their blessings. We have cherished and preserved our democracy.

"In the time of our fortune it is fitting we offer prayer for the unfortunate people in other lands who are in dire distress.

"We offer our thanks to Almighty God. May we, by our way of living, merit the continuance of his goodness."

And ever since the last Thursday in November has been the day - the president usually putting out a written, very rarely spoken, proclamation giving thanks for the special blessings of the year and recalling the original - the first harvest - and whetting the appetite for the now traditional symbols - pumpkin pie and the sweet potatoes, most dependably the turkey and the other fixings, including the inevitable cranberry sauce.

Cranberry sauce is, I fear, an acquired taste for non-native Americans, as say mint sauce is an acquired taste outside Britain.

My French gastronomic encyclopaedia has a tart note in its thousand pages of recipes.

"The idea of combining finely shredded mint leaves with a cup of vinegar and water as an adjunct to hot or cold lamb is considered indispensable in English cookery only."

But I have to say that the idea of adding a sharp fruit sauce to the unique flavour of turkey, smoked turkey especially, is to me an equal crime.

However, I'm happy to tell you about one wonderful foul-up to the American cranberry crop which on one Thanksgiving just 43 years ago deprived practically the entire nation of its favourite turkey sauce.

When the general shipment of cranberries was underway - seven million pounds had been kept for Thanksgiving - the secretary of health, education and welfare's men discovered that two bags - two pounds - contained an acrid element, a weedkiller called aminotriazole.

It was fed to rats. Guess what? - they died.

Panic in Washington. The Food and Drug Administration put out a national warning.

And their men went through the whole shipment and reported that the dreaded weedkiller was absent in the remaining 6,990,098 pounds.

Safe, they declared, for human consumption. Universal relaxation.

Well not quite. No count was kept of the families who decided to forego the delicious goo just in case - it ran into the millions.

Two White House reporters wondered if President Eisenhower had had it as usual.

His press secretary said it was none of their business.

A day or two later it came out: the Eisenhowers served apple sauce.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.