Giving Thanks
Written By Ann Hodgman
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Be grateful that 20 kids aren't watching you try to pull off a cooking workshop in a library with no oven, no burners, and one tiny sink.
"Okay, everyone! Eyes here, please!"Trembling slightly, I'm standing in the project room at my local library. For some reason I agreed last March to conduct a holiday cooking workshop here for kids ages 4 to 12. Now, to my amazement, November has arrived. Although I've forgotten everything I ever knew about anything, I still feel as though I should provide a bit of education before we start cooking. Using what my daughter used to call the Sunday School Voice, I'm leading the children through a discussion of what the Pilgrims and Native Americans might have eaten at the first Thanksgiving.
"Corn," says a little girl.
"Corn on the cob!" adds a 5-year-old.
"It was probably too late for corn on the cob," I say, "but what about some other vegetables and fruits?"
"Apples!" "Squash!" ("I hate squash," pipes up a 7-year-old named Samantha. I shoot her a sympathetic smile. My daughter used to be her babysitter, so she's allowed to go off-topic.) "Succotash! Succotash!" shrieks a boy who obviously remembers everything about everything. "And what about meats? What kinds of animals would they hunt for food?" "Turkeys!" "Deer!" "Rabbits!"
"Dogs! Dogs!" shrieks that same knowledgeable boy, who I can now see will be trouble.
"Bears!" a girl shouts. I'm not sure about bears, but at least they'll move us away from dogs.
The educational part complete, I pass out 25 individual graham-cracker pie crusts. They were embarrassing to buy — "You having a party?" the checkout girl asked me — but there can't be any real baking here. Some of the children are too young, and, in any case, our library only has a microwave.
"We put a pumpkin out on the front steps," a preschooler informs me. "The next day, raccoons had ated it."
"Well, raccoons won't eat these tarts," I say jovially. "Unless you have raccoons in your refrigerator!"
She just looks at me.
I've chosen this recipe because it can be prepared in an hour. Plus, decorating the tarts with Thanksgiving-themed sprinkles will consume 10 minutes of the hour, which is huge. If the project runs short, we can always fill the time picking spilled sprinkles out of the carpet.
We begin stirring milk into bowls of vanilla pudding mix. The younger kids like this process, but the older ones make elaborate sounds of disgust. I don't say anything, because what if they suddenly decide to start a gang? As we begin to stir the pumpkin and spices into the pudding, 8-year-old Knowledge Boy suddenly pipes up, "My mom says shouldn't we wash our hands first?"
Oh, Lord, a hand-washer. Don't parents understand that when there's only one sink available, germs don't exist? "I bet the Pilgrims didn't get to wash their hands before they started cooking," I improvise. "Can anybody tell me what you're thankful for this year?"
The answers fly in.
"A home!" (The parents coo with delight.)
"I'm thankful nobody was hurt when the garage door came down on the car." (Good point!)
As for me, I'm breathing a prayer of thanks for teachers. This workshop will last only an hour, and I'll probably take a three-hour nap when I get home. Teachers are on the job day after day, without naps. I don't know how they pull it off, but as far as I'm concerned, they deserve their own national holiday. With sprinkles.
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