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A Coal Country Thanksgiving
This week in the Rural Route Newsletter we are taking a break from politics. No election talk, no county budgets, no feuds that start at the party committee meeting and ended up on Facebook. Instead I want to tell you something about Thanksgiving in the mountains. It is not the kind of thing you see in a Hallmark movie where everybody lives in spotless rustic cabins with perfect flannel shirts and a turkey that looks like it came out of a food channel commercial. This is the kind of Thanksgiving that comes out of barns, back roads, and old kitchens where the windows fog up from real work.
I grew up on a dairy farm in the coalfields of Virginia. That meant Thanksgiving morning looked exactly like every other morning. You got up before daylight, walked out into the cold, and fed and milked the cows. The steam from their breath rose through the rafters, the milk machine hummed, and the world was quiet except for the sound of cattle shifting their weight. Neighbors might be hiking up a ridge with a rifle hoping a buck wandered by. No one was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade because our tv antenna only picked up a picture when a storm was coming.
Once the chores were finished we came inside, washed up, and sat down to what we considered the real beginning of Thanksgiving. Chicken and dumplings. Thick dumplings that sat heavy and honest. Chicken from a hen that had been scratching around the yard a day or two earlier. I grew up thinking every kid in America started Thanksgiving this way.
College at Virginia Tech straightened that out. I sat in an Appalachian history class listening to the professor explain that what we did was not common everywhere. It was a regional tradition. It stretched through the coalfields of Virginia and Kentucky, across the ridges of West Virginia, into East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, and the Blue Ridge. Families in the Smokies did it. Families in the foothills of Ohio did it. Appalachian families who moved to Cincinnati kept it alive. You can see some of this history in the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition’s article “Traditional Appalachian Thanksgiving” here:
https://uacvoice.org/2022/11/traditional-appalachian-thanksgiving/