Thanksgiving Manners: Different Views

                    

“… whoever got his dessert first started right in without waiting for the others to be served. We cleared the table by stacking the dishes. Once we were invited to our fancy relatives for supper. When we sat down at the table, my sister - who was about 11 – announced gleefully, as children do when they figure they have caught a grown-up in a mistake, ‘Somebody gave me two forks!’ We had never heard of a salad fork.”

Saints and Sinners – Etiquette at the Table

No matter how memorable your Thanksgiving was, the chances are it didn't hold a drumstick to the riotous holiday festivities of Robert Allen and his young friends on one Thanksgiving Day past. Robert was 12 at the time. The parents of one of the two boys he hung out with were suddenly called away for the day.

The food for Thanksgiving dinner had already been bought, so it was arranged that the three boys would try their hand at cooking the small turkey and making their own meal. “We were given full instructions, which we followed with much horseplay,” Allen wrote in a magazine article years later. “As the smells began to emanate from the big wood range, we went around clumping one another on the back and chortling with satisfaction.

“What made the meal memorable,” he recalled, “was that we were on our own, free of sisters and mothers and able to dispense with such things as napkins, bread-and-butter plates, manners and all civilized restraint. We heaped mounds of mashed potatoes on our plates, took all the gravy the plates would hold, eliminated sissified thin slices and just cut the turkey in chunks - to match our appetites. If someone reached across the table and clawed off a choice piece, nobody sent him from the table. We just laughed and yelled and kept on eating.

“About halfway through the meal, we all got quiet. Nobody finished his mountainous serving. We cleaned up the dishes Without any enthusiasm and wandered off in different directions, not talking. I wasn't able to think of turkey with any sense of pleasure for quite a while. Whenever the meal was mentioned afterward, we had to pretend we had a wonderful time.

“Actually, we had all had an early lesson - that joy and lack of restraint are not synonymous. That there is something to be said for women’s ways. That there is real value in etiquette, formality and civilization. Robert Allen’s story brought back memories of what mealtime was like at our house when I was growing up. You could usually find the milk bottle on the kitchen table when we were eating.

“And whoever got his dessert first started right in without waiting for the others to be served. We cleared the table by stacking the dishes. Once we were invited to our fancy relatives for supper. When we sat down at the table, my sister - who was about 11 – announced gleefully, as children do when they figure they have caught a grown-up in a mistake, ‘Somebody gave me two forks!’ We had never heard of a salad fork.

“So I suppose you could say we grew up without any table manners. You could if you were talking about the kind of manners you read about in etiquette books. But after I grew up, I realized that we had been learning the kind of table manners that count. We were not allowed to stuff our mouths or talk with food in our mouths.

“We never criticized anything our mother put on our plates. We had to say ‘Please’ and ‘May I?’ and my father insisted on no nonsense at the table. Each of us said a table grace before we started eating, and another prayer before we left the table. I remember how shocked I was when I saw my first food fight at the fraternity house when I went to college. My father would have taken me out of college if he had seen the rolls and other food flying around the dining hall.

“As for Robert Allen, looking back with chagrin at the disastrous Thanksgiving dinner of his boyhood, he confessed. “In the future, whenever I let my appetite get away with me. I practically glowed with pleasure as my mother would lean across the corner of the table, rap me a good one behind the ear with her knuckle, and say sternly. ‘Robert, you're at the table!’” – George Plagenz, ©1999 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia