The Holidays are looming before us and I have a confession to make about one particular Holiday. I love Thanksgiving. No doubt this is in part attributable to the fact that we are always guests on Thanksgiving, never hosts. None of that all week cleaning, all day cooking, all night cleaning up for me. Nope, I’m like the 87th Airborne; I parachute in, fulfill my mission (in this case eat) and then move out and on to the next challenge.
Turkey with all the fixings is a nice appetizer for what, in my mind has always been the main course, apple pie. Everything else is foreplay. It may be extremely pleasant but it’s still not the point of the exercise. Apple pie is it. The perfect ending to a perfect Holiday.
It turns out my family has a long history of Thanksgivings. We almost go back to the first one. Almost but not quite. The first Parmelee, whom we refer to as “Young John,” arrived in Charlestown, Massachusetts in late spring or early summer of 1635. Young John must have been a great letter writer because his father, we call him “Grandpa John,” arrived in New Haven, Connecticut four years later.
The early Parmelees were Puritans, a source of some irony and considerable amusement to me since this particular branch of the current generation is anything but Puritan. The timing of my ancestors arrival on these shores also helps to explain my attitude toward immigration. We should have closed the borders in 1640 and kept the rest of riff-raff out, but it’s too late to change all that now. Americans who can trace their ancestry back before the Pilgrims would probably pick an earlier date.
I’m guessing that Young John had a real good sales pitch because Grandpa John arrived in July of 1639. He was already 55 years old and had outlived four wives by that point. Grandpa John was also a rather prolific fellow, having fathered 13 children among those four wives although his record at keeping them alive past infancy is, at best, spotty. Although he took another wife in Connecticut when he was almost 70, his begetting days were behind him.
Not so with Young John. The boy was 22 when he arrived in Charlestown, eventually met up with his Dad in Connecticut and they both settled in Guilford, Connecticut. Young John did his best at begetting but he never did catch his father’s record. He did pretty well though, three wives, 10 children and 74 grandchildren. Imagine their Thanksgiving.
Since then we’ve carried on down through the generations, I think I’m about 9th or 10th generation, and there are about as many spellings of Parmelee as there were Parmelees after the first few generations. This gives those of us who have trouble spelling a tendency toward hubris on the spelling issue since we can say, “maybe I can’t spell ‘cat’ if you spot me the ‘c’ and the ‘t’ but at least I can spell my own name and my great, great, great grandfather couldn’t even do that!”
I discovered all this when I stumbled on a website devoted to the Parmelee lineage when I was trying to find out a little about my grandfather whom I never knew. Turns out a guy in Los Angeles, a former news editor and copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, has spent 30 years compiling all this information. I sent him what little information I had and he tied me into the rest of the clan. As it happens there are a couple of United States Presidents in the family, albeit two of the worst.
But I don’t have to worry about seeing them at Thanksgiving which is the other thing I like about the Holidays in general and Thanksgiving in particular, I like all the people I get to see this time of year. To tell the truth I like them a lot. And as much as I enjoy playing Scrooge before the ghosts come to visit most of the year, comes the Holidays and I’m a little like Old Fezziwig. I delight in the spirit of the thing. Just don’t get between me and that apple pie.
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