We spent our first Halloween at Mill Brook several years ago, and to mark the occasion, we purchased three pumpkins, one large and two small, and placed them by the front porch. It poured rain, so no tricker-or-treaters came; they weren’t used to having us there for that holiday anyway, but the pumpkins remained until Thanksgiving, after which we carried them out to the septic mound for the benefit of any animals partial to pumpkin. Before we left for home, I dug out the Christmas wreath Kathy Hallenbeck made for us last year and hung it on the front door.
On the drive home, I pondered the firm divide we Americans create between Christmas and Thanksgiving, between our fall holidays and our winter ones. Only on the day after Thanksgiving does Christmas shopping officially begin, and we castigate merchants as crass and thoughtless who jump the gun by putting out Christmas decorations before we’ve finished roasting our turkeys and devouring pumpkin pies. Franklin Roosevelt tried to move Thanksgiving forward one week in order to boost the economy by allowing more days for Christmas shopping, testimony to our distaste for doing anything Christmas before Thanksgiving.
Why this rigidity? In Europe, autumn flows naturally into winter. In October, fresh game with cranberry sauce is featured on menus, butchers hang dressed rabbits and pheasants outside their shops, and slowly fruit breads and Christmas stollen appear in bakery windows. (“Backbeginn November” is the chapter in my German cookbook that covers these holiday breads.) The aroma of sugar-coated nuts and roasting chestnuts fills town squares; outdoor markets sell springerle forms, cookie cutters, and crèche figures. Giant lighted stars, strung above the main shopping streets, announce Advent: the bakeries now feature Christmas cookies, and churches fill up with candle-laden fir trees or other seasonal decorations. The transition has been seamless.
We Americans explain the line we draw between Thanksgiving and Christmas on the grounds that we have Thanksgiving and Europeans do not, but I think the real answer lies in the fact that our American fall traditions are all uniquely American: the squash and pumpkins, the turkeys, the brilliant autumn leaves, the scarecrows and cornstalks, the history of the Pilgrims, and the big deal we make out of Halloween—all American. Our Christmas customs, on the other hand—decorated trees, holly, yule logs, mistletoe, carols, glass ornaments, roasted birds or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, fruitcake and other confections—all derive, in one way or another, from Europe. Even Santa Claus, uniquely American, especially when advertising Coke (!) started out as Saint Nicholas. We don’t shift seasons as much as we shift cultures and continents, and the traditionalists among us don’t do it lightly.