Thanks comes from the heart, not the calendar

Christmas was not observed in her family. She was the younger widow of an old Confederate veteran who adhered to his ancestors' belief that celebrating Christmas was a pagan custom. (It was against the law in parts of Georgia as late as the 18th century.) But she was a natural for Thanksgiving.

Not feasting. She knew nothing about the traditional turkey and all the trimmings motif. In the first place, she had no use for turkeys.

"Them's senseless critters, " she told me. "I never tried to raise one after the first one I had stood out in the rain and drownded, too blamed dumb to git hisself out of the rain."

She would have liked to "make a good spread of vittles" for her children, but sometimes it was impossible. Crops failed, meat "spiled, " her cow went dry.

"We was down to nothing one year, " she said. "No meat in the smokehouse, no meal in the bin."

Her boys were playing down on the "big road" from her house - a small country road, really, but "nigh paved" with gravel. They saw a neighbor going by on his mule, taking his corn to the mill.

"He had a-plenty of it and he drapped a sack, " she related. One of her boys picked it up and rushed home with it. They could get it ground and have bread for dinner!

"He was s'proud, " she recalled. "But t'warn't honest. I made him take out after the man that lost it and give it back to him."

So what did they do about Thanksgiving?

She laughed. She fried up two squirrels and a rabbit the young'uns had caught in a trap they made. And they all went fishing.

"We was plumb full of that meat. Not hongry the least bit. They fished and cut up, swinging out over the creek on a bullace vine. It was too cold to git in the water but the swinging was fine. And I set there and looked at them and at the day. The sun was warm, the sky clare.

"I felt thankfulness well up in my heart. I was young and stout enough to make a crop. They was ever last one healthy and good. We'd have fish for supper. They was biting pretty good. I set right there and thanked the good Lord for what we had."

Before they left the creek bank she told the children it was Thanksgiving Day and they should "tell the Lord they was much obliged to him for a good life."

It was easy since they had a string of fish.

Then she said something I have never forgotten. "You have to look sharp and pay attention to know when you got something to be thankful of. It ain't a day somebody else says celebrate. It's a knowing in your own heart."