The Way Things Were Someone was saying why is it the lottery officials in this country know a couple of hours after it closes exactly how many tickets were sold and which stores sold the winning tickets and yet we are sadly lacking during elections. If we believe what we are told there is never any way to get all the result in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe we should let the lottery officials run the elections? Just kidding, but I think you see what I am getting at. There are just so many screwed up things. That is why I like Thanksgiving so much. It is a holiday we can all agree on, but I have to wonder if this will be true in the future. The way things seem to be going you just never know. When I was a child living in Brooklyn New York, no one celebrated Halloween. We used to celebrate Thanksgiving by dressing up much as is done in Halloween today and go around knocking on doors and asking if people had anything for Thanksgiving. I never heard about going around on Halloween. Everyone celebrated this way. We would even go into stores and they would give us little things like a pack of candy or cookies. One thing I have to say is I never heard of anyone doing anything to the stuff they gave the kids until Halloween became the time kids went around. I remember when my mother went around with me and she dressed up as a bum and so did I. Everyone in the neighborhood was poor, but they always managed to come up with something for us. Holidays come and go. Several which used to be celebrated in New England are no more. They were Training day, Anniversary Day, Forefather’s Day, Shad Spawning and Corn Husking Day. I can understand why these disappeared, they don’t seem to fit into modern day activities. Take Corn Husking Day for example. It was one of many harvest celebrations. We are no longer an agrarian society so you can see why this one went bye-bye. Now Forefather’s Day was another story, this could have become a national holiday. It celebrated the landing of the Mayflower at Plymouth. It was a large celebration for the time. Training Day started as a six-time event and eventually became a once a year activity. It had to do with practicing in arms for protection and became a contest for the best shooters. There are some holidays that a lot of the world enjoys and yet we don’t observe them. One is May Day. It is a celebration of the first day of spring. In Britain it’s a three-day holiday weekend. Some celebrate it as a reminder of the rights of labor. Every country has it special holidays. When we think of holidays there seems to be at least one candidate coming to the surface in this country. That pre-holiday is Black Friday. It might as well be a national holiday since so many people here celebrate it by buying what they perceived to be bargains which are not available the rest of the year. What is so nice about Thanksgiving is it is for everyone no matter what their religious preferences are. It morphed from what it was in my childhood days in Brooklyn to a day which is celebrated by a feast usually with a turkey as the main dish. That is why it was such a shame a lot of turkeys were recalled this year along with a lot of turkey products. When I tell people about the way Thanksgiving was celebrated where I lived, they have a hard time believing it. Then I hit them with another fact which is we didn’t know what a pizza was until I moved to a different place. There were no pizza parlors in my neighborhood. Apparently, this was not true in many other places in Brooklyn so we were unusual in that respect. It might have had something to do with the fact people where I lived were very poor and a pizza parlor probably couldn’t have made it. Some of the kids were so poor their parents couldn’t afford shoes for them so they would cut the back of the shoes out so when their feet grew, they would still have something on their feet. Poverty is no stranger to me and my heart goes out to those today who are in a similar situation. There used to be an empty lot on a corner of my neighborhood and people would dump things there. As you can probably figure out it was the type of place which attracts kids. This might not be true today because kids don’t seem to go out much, they are too interested in playing computer games. I remember one day I went to the lot with my friends and we were looking through some stuff and I found a brand-new watch in a box someone must have thrown out by mistake. To me it was like finding a treasure. I was only about 8 years old when I found it. Us kids used to do something I don’t see kids doing anymore. We used to do a lot of trading. If one kid had something you wanted you would ask him what you had that he would want for it. It might be a comic book, or a toy of some kind. I had a German helmet from World War II which my father had brought home from the war. It had a bullet hole in the temple. I wasn’t crazy about it. One of the kids had a toy cannon which I liked and I offered to trade him the helmet for the cannon and we made the trade and both of us were happy. Trading comics was a common thing to do and there was a store which sold used comics for five cents for two. Can you imagine how much some of them would be worth today? We used to build our own toys out of wood from crates and other pieces of wood. One of our favorite things to build were Limonium guns. You needed a wooden mop handle, a couple of strong rubber bands and the type of clothespin that clamped. You nailed one end of the rubber band to the front of the mop handle. Then you stretched out the rubber band and if it didn’t reach the other end of the mop handle you connect more rubber bands together. The clothespin was at the opposite end of the mop handle from where the rubber band was attached. You would take a piece of Limonium which was cut into a square, put it inside the end of the rubber band and clamp this down with the clothespin. When you wanted to fire you would press the clothespin open. We were always outside doing things and got plenty of exercise. It was also a lot of fun. Kids today don’t realize what they are missing.
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