I know, it sounds like this post is going to be all serious and stuff. But it's not. It's just to show the "good" stuff the kids did around Thanksgiving (and to show Uncle Luke he hasn't won the Redneck War). Our kids still have class (a little, anyway).
In preparation, we read bunches of books about the Pilgrims and Indians and the Mayflower. One morning when the kids woke up I informed them that we were headed off on a long journey, and that they needed to pack -- but they could only pack the same things the Pilgrims packed, which were a Bible, one set of clothes, tools, cooking implements, firearms, and one toy.
For Vincent, "one toy" translated to: his wooden catapult (to fight the Indians), his nerf sword (to fight the Indians), his wooden shield (to fight the Indians), and a truck. When I pointed out that trucks weren't invented in Pilgrim times, he informed me that he had invented them. So there.
The kids took it farther than I thought they would. They combed through their dress-up boxes for suitable outfits. Vincent found a frilly white shirt, and Catherine pulled out a green dress from Gaga that looked perfect for a good little Pilgrim girl. To this she added her colonial bonnet. Dommie stripped off his clothes and ran around naked.
The Pilgrims also packed food. For 66 days they ate hard tack, a form of beef jerkey, and, if they could cook safely on the ship, soup of dried beans. The problem was, many of those 66 days were turbulent, so lighting a cooking fire on board was out of the question.
So we made our own hard tack. Flour, water and salt. Lots of salt. I turned the kids loose with the ingredients and let them roll out their hard tack and bake it. It was surprisingly decent and, not so surprisingly, horrendously messy. But by the fourth day that stuff was HARD. Like, crack-a-tooth hard. Poor Pilgrims.
But the most important thing we did was to remember the true meaning of the Thanksgiving spirit: Being grateful for all that we have, and remembering that not everyone has these same blessings. So on a sunny Saturday afternoon we went to our church and decorated tons of boxes to deliver to families without the means to have a big Thanksgiving dinner, and then the kids filled them with food. But I had to agree with Vincent when he said, with a slight shudder, that he was glad there was no hard tack in those boxes.
On Friday afternoon the kids were constructing pyramids and writing hieroglyphics from ancient Egypt. By Monday we had time-traveled to a Powhatan Indian village and Jamestown, where the first settlers landed in 1607 (way before those credit-hogging Pilgrims). Tuesday morning found us scooting down decidedly modern waterslides, and Tuesday afternoon we had skipped back to the 1700s in colonial Williamsburg. I vacillate between thinking that the kids will someday have an in-depth appreciation of history and thinking that they're going to expect to see King Tut at Jamestown.
