Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales. This is your host, John Haggardorn. Well, it's that season.

It's Thanksgiving time.

Today's story is called How We Kept Thanksgiving at Old Town by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

The story was adopted from Stowe's novel, Old Town Folks, which she wrote in 1869, about post-American Revolution New England in Natick, Massachusetts.

We hope you enjoy it.

When the apples were all gathered and the cider was all made,

and the yellow pumpkins were rolled in from many a hill and billows of gold,

and the corn was husked, and the labors of the season were done, and the warm,

late days of Indian summer came in, dreamy and calm and still, with just frost enough to

crisp the ground of a morning. But with warm trances of benigned it, sunny hours at noon,

there came over the community a sort of genial repose of spirit, a sense of

something accomplished, and of a new golden mark made in advance on the calendar of life,

and the deacon began to say to the minister of a Sunday,

I suppose it's about time for the Thanksgiving proclamation.

Conversation at this time began to turn on high and solemn

culinary mysteries at receipts of wondrous power and virtue. New modes of elaborating squash pies

and quince tarts were now, oftentimes carefully discussed at the evening firesides by Aunt Lois and

Aunt Caziah, and notes seriously

compared with the experiences of certain other aunties of high repute in such matters.

I noticed that on these occasions their voices often fell into mysterious whispers, and that

receipts of a special power and sanctity were communicated in tones so low as entirely

to escape the vulgar ear. I still remember the solemn shake of the head with which my aunt

...