Until the era of trains, freeways and cheap flight tickets the holidays were pretty much an at home holiday. At best we would go to the grandparents in Eugene and the Portland contingent would make the two hour drive to Eugene. That's two hours on the 5. I have no idea how long it would have taken on old 99. I know it took us almost an hour to do the just under forty miles on the truck route of hwy 59.
So this zipping off to the other side of the country for the holidays has really only been going on since the early sixties. Come on, It's one Thanksgiving and maybe one Christmas. To try and make sure there are no empty places at the tables next year
And I'm reminded of a scene in the movie 1776. John and Abigail Adams are having a long distance mental conversation. John has been gone for months. Why doesn't he come home for a visit. "It's only three hundred miles. If you left right now you could be home in only eight days."
That was brought on by the digging through the family tree. If the Thanksgiving holiday had been celebrated in the colonies getting the family together, well probably wouldn't happen. At least not very often. If James and Abigail Heaton, living in the colony of New Jersey had decided to risk the North Atlantic they would have had to leave in October. Hope the seas and the storms were cooperative spend at least three weeks at sea aboard a boat about a hundred feet long with no passenger cabins. Probably landing at Liverpool.
Once you are back in England where do you go? The Heatons are from West Yorkshire in the north and the Paxons hail from Buckingham county near London. It's a little further to London but the abysmal roads are even more abysmal the further north you travel. Which is why the whole trip would never have happened in the first place. Catch the Pilgrim Adventure on TCM sometime. I assume the boats were a little better by the seventeen seventies but, The North Atlantic in the fall was no joke and you didn't sail if you didn't have to.
And yes, I probably should have had this bright idea last week before folks started traveling. You catch that note "lost at sea" for a Massachusetts man, or shipwrecked for a a couple of guys from the Viking era you stop and think. To Skype or Zoom or cell phone for this Thanksgiving is no great sacrifice to make sure that you all are there for the next Thanksgiving.
And a special thanks to all the folks who have to work on this day. And probably would have been working anyway. First responders, doctors, nurses, care givers, those deployed overseas or on bases on the other side of the country. Saying thank you for your service seems very trite, but it's all I've got.
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