“May I have these skates?” asked Billy. “I like to look at them and remember that they belonged to a real girl. I’ll hang them on my wall.”
“I’m sure that great-grandmother Ellen would be very happy to have them belong to you, Billy. You’re just the kind of boy that she would have approved of,” said Somebody.
How Thanksgiving came
“GOBBLE, gobble, gobble,” said Mr. Turkey Cock proudly spreading his wonderful turkey tail fan and looking as pompous as no one but he can look.
“Oh, you funny, conceited bird,” said the boy named Billy, “you won’t be so noisy next Thursday when we have you for Thanksgiving dinner. But that reminds me—won’t somebody please tell me why the turkey is called our National bird? I thought it was the eagle. And why do we always have Thanksgiving Day on Thursday?”
“Well, you see, Son,” said Somebody, “it started this way. As you of course know, our Pilgrim Fathers and Mothers came over in the Mayflower and landed on Plymouth Rock on November 21st, 1620; just one hundred and two brave souls in a strange land, full of strange people who might well resent their being there. Although it was late in the year and cold weather, they managed to build themselves houses of a sort; but with the best that they could do more than half of them perished that first terrible winter.
“When Spring came, those who were left, with the help of the Indians, bravely planted the crops and started to make a home in the wilderness. The Indians gave them corn for seed and taught them how to plow the land and fertilize it, and with the seed that they had brought with them they managed so well that when harvest time came they had a bountiful yield. To express their gratitude to God who had so marvelously prospered them, as well as to show their friendliness to the Indians, Governor Bradford issued a proclamation to the effect that they would have a Thanksgiving feast to which Chief Massasoit and his braves were to be invited, which should last from Thursday morning until Saturday night. That was in October, 1621.
“But the Pilgrim Mothers, remembering the harvest festivals of England, with the barbecued sheep and oxen which they used to have, said ‘How can we make a feast? We have no meat.’ ‘Meat,’ said Governor Bradford, ‘why the woods are full of it.’ So he sent four of his very best riflemen out into the forest for wild turkeys, and they brought back so many that there was enough meat for the three days feasting for the colonists and their guests, the Indians. And ever since then no Thanksgiving feast could be really right without a nice plump turkey.”