Thanksgiving Hancock County Style

Modern culture gives a great deal of publicity to the Thanksgiving Holiday with shopping being its main focus.  While elementary schools still teach the story of the first Thanksgiving, most kids today know it as Black Friday, or the day Mom and the rest of the family goes Christmas shopping.  

Sixty years ago in Hancock County Thanksgiving was the deadline for farmers  to have their crops put away before the hard frost hit and the time when grading tobacco was to be completed.  We did not entertain relatives at Thanksgiving unless they were there to help get hog killing done or to finish tobacco grading. Travel outside the county was rare at this time of year. The only traffic jams I heard about around Thanksgiving were those at the tobacco warehouses as farmers rushed to get their graded tobacco on the warehouse floor for the first sale. This first sale was important because the income from the sale allowed the farmer to be able to spend for the upcoming Christmas and be able to get his debt paid off on the crop he had just harvested.  If he missed the first sales of December then he and his family had to wait until after Christmas to celebrate.

Hog killing was THE big deal at our house because it usually took three days to fully process the meat for preservation.  Each year we killed two hogs, usually of the same breed, each weighing roughly 400 pounds. We waited to kill the hogs until we had a decent cold spell so the meat would 'keep' (not spoil without refrigeration). The first day consisted of killing, scalding, scraping, and butchering of the hogs.  Hams, shoulders, and bacon were salted and hung in the smoke house.  Sausage meat, intestines, organ meat and the head and feet were stacked in the smoke house to be ground, cooked or processed the next day. On the third day we rendered lard, canned or froze the sausage, and made souse meat. Relatives and neighbors exchanged help with each other in order to receive help with their own process.  If there was any type of meal celebration at the end of the process it was assumed that the meat dish would be some type of fresh hog meat.

Invariably, each year some incident occurred during the processing of the meat to provide us with a story to share.  One year the gun used to shoot the hogs misfired, scaring the hogs who had to be corralled and brought back to the hog pin; another year the scaffolding used to hang the hog for butchering broke and the hog crashed to the ground midway through scraping. Luckily no one was injured.  The incident that I remember the most from hog killing involved Aunt Ruby who accidentally punctured a hog gut while trimming away the fat around it.  The stinch was so bad that we had to leave the house for several hours until the house was 'aired out'. Mama fussed for days over this incident saying, "If Ruby had been paying attention to what she was doing in the first place, it never would have happened!" Mama always was eager to find fault with Aunt Ruby so she could elevate her own visions of herself as 'perfect' at everything. 

During my growing-up the words hog killing and Thanksgiving were synonymous. The only celebration we had was in the knowledge that one of the last fall tasks for the year had been completed. As one seasonal song says, "all was now gathered in" and we were ready for the long, cold, dark season of winter. It's hard for me still to think of Thanksgiving as a special holiday like Christmas because of its association with work and preparation for winter. And I don't think I will ever be able to grasp the modern focus of Thanksgiving and shopping frenzies. I suppose that what we all end up celebrating in any holiday is our memories of that holiday from a variety of learned experiences.  patsylawson.com