Family Holidays
Family Holidays
Copyright 2018 Harris B. McKee
I suppose that everyone remembers special family get-togethers and that was certainly true in the McKee family. Our two special days of the year were Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. Christmas was ok to celebrate with your mother's family, but it wasn't a truly McKee event.
My father and his three brothers farmed within about three and a half miles of each other in Warren County, Iowa a few miles south of the state capitol in Des Moines. Between them, they accounted for eleven children, one of whom had married and started a family in the same neighborhood. Two more were married by the time I was in high school. In addition, Aunt Mabel, and my grandmother lived in our home. Also, Cousin Billy Neely came from Greenfield about 60 miles away. Altogether, we might marshall about 25 or 30 family members for our Thanksgiving dinners which rotated every year around the family members.
The Thanksgiving celebrations were great times for reminiscing about Indianola High School football where I was playing and Iowa State where nearly all had graduated. I still remember Jim Hickman, who had married my cousin Margaret, relating that the modified short-punt football offense that Indianola was still using in a day when Split-T had taken over, had been developed at the University of Northern Iowa (still called Iowa State Teachers College then) and spread over the state. We had all the usual goodies with multiple kinds of dressing, many vegetables, and mashed potatoes and chicken (we didn't raise turkeys; we did all raise chickens). But the most wonderful part of the Thanksgiving dinner was cranberry ice.
Modern children don't appreciate what refrigerators were in the 1940's. They seemed marvelous when compared to the ice boxes still in use in some parts of the county that didn't have electricity. But compared to day's units, they were tiny; the freezing compartments were only a little bigger than the ice cube trays but that was where the cranberry ice was made and typically removed, beaten, and then refrozen. And to us, it was truly ambrosial.
Fourth of July was not nearly as big an event as Thanksgiving but it too was memorable. It was the only day of the summer when we stopped fieldwork during the week at noon to celebrate. As we did for Thanksgiving, the family gathered together and rotated the location from year to year. Food again was out of sight. Fried chicken, corn on the cob, watermelon, and maybe homemade ice-cream. We didn't have a freezer but at least one of my cousins did. There was another aspect that made the Fourth special.
Fireworks! Looking back, the fireworks of our family celebrations were paltry even compared to what Mary and our grandchildren did in a gravel pit in Arkansas fifty years later. Iowa had banned fireworks, so except for displays at the Iowa State Fair, the only fireworks we had were usually bootlegged into Iowa from Missouri. When I was about four, my cousin Bob set off firecrackers in his family backyard with all of us watching. I thought they were just too loud. Later, my father brought back firecrackers from Missouri on the way from the Milking Shorthorn national office in Springfield, Missouri and I had no difficulty helping set them off.