Express your gratitude as a daily activity in November

Welcome to November. It’s “National Gratitude Month.” Dagnabbit: What a great idea! Give thanks to Stacy Grewal, an author, spiritual mentor and life coach, who first suggested the official designation.

Let’s make every day in November a day of thankfulness. The folks at National Day Calendar, an organization based in Mandan, N.D., approved Grewal’s recommendation in 2015. As a result, November is now to be forever known as National Gratitude Month in North America.

“Gratitude is an essential ingredient of a happy, fulfilling life,” said Grewal, who wrote the book Gratitude and Goals: Create the Life You Would Love to Live, published in 2010.

She noted: “Research shows that practicing daily gratitude can enhance our moods, decrease stress and drastically improve our overall level of wellbeing.”

The 30 days of November present “a great opportunity to see if you can improve your life by getting more in touch with gratitude,” Grewal said. “Grateful people tend to be healthier, more physically fit and have much more satisfying personal and professional relationships.”

She shares the soapbox with Lewis Howes, a U.S. Olympian (team handball) and author. He coined the phrase “attitude of gratitude,” according to Andrew Merle, a contributor to the Huffington Post.

Grewal offers a bit of testimony on her website, agratefulplanet.com. She has counted her blessings since 1997, when she conquered alcohol. “My life has had its ups and downs, but every day I grow more happy, joyous and free,” she wrote. “I’m on a mission to share things to help others to live happier, fuller, more grateful, spiritually enlightened lives.”

She and her husband, along with their three sons, live in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, which is just north of Toronto. Grewal welcomes comments via her Facebook account.

The benefits of gratitude impact individuals in a physical, psychological and social matter, according to a study from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. People that practice gratitude on a daily basis tend to have:

Fewer feelings of isolation and loneliness; a stronger immune system; better sleep; lowered blood pressure; reduced anxiety and depression; reduction in body aches and pains; and increased satisfaction at work/school.

Heather Haunga, writing for The Organized Mom website, said parents who are interested in schooling their children about gratitude might want to consider a few family activities.

Create a “family gratitude jar.” Family members are invited to add notes about things they are thankful for, and share the contents at dinner on Thanksgiving.

Select a collection of Thanksgiving and gratitude books for family reading time.

Paint some “gratitude stones” with pretty hearts that can be conversation starters about thankfulness and also used as gifts to be given to precious friends.

Create a “thankful tree” that allows each family member to contribute notes on colored leaves cut from construction paper. It makes a great decoration. Instructions can be found at onecreativemommy.com/thankful-tree-tutorial-printable/.

Additionally, Janae Jacobson, who maintains the “I Can Teach My Child” website, suggests a family-fun game, “turkey toss of thankfulness.” Taking turns, participants toss the turkey ball back and forth while saying what they’re thankful for. Half the fun of it is making your own turkey ball with feathers.

Laurie Turk of TipJunkie.com recommends children make the holiday dinner table placemats, and offers seven tutorials from which to choose.

Angie Kauffman has several websites that she manages. One is “Real Life at Home,” and she shares tips about children making the entire table cloth. Perhaps this project is more suited for older children or a houseful of young artists.

Literature is filled with poetry and words of wisdom from some of the old masters. Among them was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC), the Roman statesman, orator, lawyer and philosopher, who said: “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others.”

“Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul,” said Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87), an American Congregationalist clergyman and social reformer.

Young children can grasp that imagery of a flower blooming as well as understand the message conveyed by William Arthur Ward (1921-94), an American writer of inspirational maxims, who said:

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” 

Pumpkins carve a chapter in literary history

Cinderella’s magical coach that would carry her to the royal ball at the castle was a symmetrical, but slightly squatty, brilliant reddish-orange pumpkin that was harvested from her cold-hearted stepmother’s garden.

“Cinderella,” of course, is a 1950 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney, a great critical and commercial hit that was nominated for three Academy Awards, including the “Original Song” with “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” It was sung by Verna Felton, the voice of the benevolent fairy godmother.

The story itself predates Disney; its roots go back to ancient Greece. In the modern storybook version, the fairy godmother scooped the goop out of the inside of the pumpkin, “leaving nothing but the rind. Having done this, she struck the pumpkin with her wand, and it was instantly turned into a fine coach, gilded all over with gold.”

Indeed, Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage is, by far, “the most famous pumpkin of all time found in literature,” writes Diana Biller, a freelance writer and author from Los Angeles. Her essay was published by Barnes & Noble Booksellers.

The modern Cinderella story was published in 1697, within “The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault.” Charles Perrault was a French author who laid the foundation for a new literary genre, the fairy tale.

Other well-known Perrault tales include “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Puss in Boots,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Bluebeard.” Also in 1697, Perrault published a collection of folktales with the subtitle “Tales of My Mother Goose.” (Do you suppose the goose was a gander?)

The runner-up literary pumpkin is the Great Pumpkin, created by cartoonist Charles Schulz. The Great Pumpkin, Biller wrote, is a holiday giant like Santa Claus, but it has only one die-hard believer – Linus van Pelt.

The Great Pumpkin is yet to appear on Halloween night, but dagnabbit, Linus never stops believing it will come.

Schulz introduced the Great Pumpkin on a television special in 1966. The early characters from the Peanuts gang were all there – Charlie Brown, Sally Brown, Snoopy, Lucy van Pelt, Schroeder, Pig-Pen, Violet, Frieda, Patty and Shermy.

On Halloween night, Linus waits patiently, standing in the hometown pumpkin patch in Sebastopol, Calif., a small town in Sonoma County, where Schulz’ art studio was located. It was a great place for all those Peanuts kids to grow up.

Linus tells the audience: “Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the ‘most sincere.’ He’s gotta pick this one. I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around, and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.”

Pumpkins are a fun fruit. There are hundreds of varieties. Orange is the dominate color for pumpkins, but they also come in shades of tan, white, blue, green and pink. There are tall ones, squatty ones, oblong ones, warty ones…and miniatures.

Lisa Hallett Taylor is a contributor to The Spruce, a food and beverage website. She commented about some of the interesting varieties of pumpkins. Taking center stage are the big, fat, monster, jumbos – the stars of county fairs and festivals – trucked in and hoisted on scales.

“Huge pumpkins are not to be eaten or carved,” she said. “They often lack the flavor of their smaller cousins, and scooping out the pulp can be a chore.”

Alexia Fernández Campbell of The Atlantic magazine interviewed Dr. Mohammad Babadoost, a crop scientist at the University of Illinois, who says the recent “pumpkin spice craze” has created a ton of enthusiasm within the industry.

He stated: “People want pumpkin for bread, pie, wine, ice cream, recreational purposes.” Recreational purposes? He’s referring to the growing popularity of pumpkin patches and farms, Fernández said.

“Pumpkin farms across the country have created lucrative agritourism businesses, and when someone visits one of these farms, it only fuels their love of pumpkins,” she wrote.

Over time, “pumpkin” has become a “term of endearment.” The most recent Valentine’s Day list of favorite lovey-doveyisms, was compiled by Rachel Quin of Collins Dictionaries, based in Glasgow, Scotland.

The top five terms are: “sweetheart, darling, honey bunch, pumpkin and sugar.”

In Carteret County, N.C., you might hear the word pronounced as “punkin.”

Elijah Dickinson deserves a ‘pumpkin seed’ of respect

By far, Illinois grows more pumpkins than any other state in the country, and the Village of Morton, Ill., is known as the “Pumpkin Capital of the World.”

The claim is indisputable, because nearly 90% of all canned pumpkin products sold in North America are processed at the Libby’s Pumpkin plant in Morton. Most of the pumpkins used for canning are grown locally within a 50-mile radius. They are trucked in “ripe-off-the-vine” during harvest season.

Morton’s “great” pumpkin story began when Elijah Dickinson moved from Kentucky to Eureka, Ill., in 1835. “At the time, he didn’t know he was carrying with him the seeds of a multi-million-dollar pumpkin industry,” say the proprietors of Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co.

Elijah’s son, Roger Dickinson, purchased an existing cannery in Eureka in 1898. At first, approximately 50 men were employed to pack corn, beans and tomatoes. In 1902, Dickinson and Company experimented with canning flesh from the pumpkins grown on Dickinson family farms. Bingo.

As the business grew, new canning plants were opened nearby in Washington in 1909 and in Morton in 1925. All of the Dickinson operations were acquired in 1929 by the Libby, McNeill and Libby Company of Chicago. Soon afterward, all of the canned pumpkin production was consolidated at the Morton facility. (Nestlé USA acquired the Libby’s brand in 1972.)

The seed scientists at Baker Creek say the Dickinson pumpkin is “a medium to large tan squash, weighing 10-30 pounds or more. It is rather oblong, tapering somewhat at the blossom end with slight, flattened ribbing, firm skin and thick orange flesh.”

Joe Sevier, associate editor at Epicurious, a food and cooking website, picked up on that description right away, as he wrote: “The pumpkin pie you grew up eating…was most likely made not from pumpkin, but from squash.”

He revealed: “Libby’s Pure Pumpkin, the quintessential American canned pumpkin brand,” technically may be “golden-fleshed” winter squash.

Wisely, he chose not to rock the boat and wrote: “All we really care about is whether it tastes good. Just pop open a can and accept the fact that if it was good enough for grandma, it’s good enough for you.”

Steve Stein of the Peoria (Ill.) Journal Star interviewed Roz O’Hearn, a communications executive with Nestlé USA. She said: “Libby’s Pumpkin is very high in fiber, which health experts say is vital to good health and often deficient in American diets. “This is why pumpkin is sometimes referred to as a ‘superfood.’”

Jaclyn London, the nutrition director at the Good Housekeeping Institute in New York City, commented: “Pumpkin is loaded with blood pressure-regulating minerals potassium and magnesium as well as iron.”

Jim Davis, the American cartoonist who created the “Garfield” comic strip, once wrote: “Vegetables are a must on a diet. I suggest carrot cake, zucchini bread and pumpkin pie.”

He’s correct on one out of three. Zucchini and pumpkin are technically fruits that taste like vegetables.

The University of Illinois extension office offers confirmation that the Pilgrims did invent a pumpkin custard dessert (but it wasn’t a dagnabbit pie).

Extension agents said the early American settlers would cut off the top off the pumpkin, scoop out the seeds and stringy goop, then mix in milk or cream, honey, eggs and spices. With the top back on, the pumpkin was placed in the hot ashes of a cooking fire and baked.

This image led to the adage expressed by many chefs and diners alike: “Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first.”

The brain seems to agree, especially when it comes to the aroma of pumpkin. A writer at the Live Science website, Rachel Ross, interviewed Dr. Catherine Franssen, assistant professor of psychology at Longwood University in Farmville, Va.

The smells associated with autumn season and the holidays of Halloween and Thanksgiving “tap into our sense of nostalgia,” Dr. Franssen said.

“Smell is the only one of our senses that is transmitted directly to the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain,” Dr. Franssen said. “Before we even realize it,” she said, “pumpkin flavors can bring back warm memories of home baking, family time, parties and feasts, as well as other positive links with fall.”

Humans are wired to be “Peter, Peter pumpkin eaters.” Go with it.

‘Oktoberfest season’ highlights the pretzel: Is it a Southern delicacy?

Is the pretzel a “Southern food?” The folks who run the Southern Kitchen social media site in Atlanta, say: “Yes” – especially if you’re serving soft pretzels with pimento cheese.

For a unique twist, try the pretzel and pimento cheese fondue concoction offered by Tupelo Honey Café, a restaurant chain based in Asheville, N.C. Owner Stephen Frabitore said the dish is “a fun, entertaining and brag-worthy party hors d’oeuvre or, if paired with a simple salad, a comforting and casual supper by the fireplace.”

Since 2008, Tupelo Honey Café has focused on creating a “revival of Southern food and traditions rooted in the Carolina mountains,” Frabitore said. It seems to be working. Other Tupelo Honey Café restaurants in North Carolina are found in Charlotte and Raleigh. In all, the company now operates 18 restaurants in 10 states.

Pretzels are associated with the celebration of Oktoberfest, held annually in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The beer and pretzel wing-ding lasts at least 16 days and ushers in the fall season.

Steven Musil, reporting for Microsoft News, said pretzels date back to the 7th century. “Originally a soft, squishy bread, made with a simple mixture of water, flour and salt, pretzels could be consumed when Christians were forbidden to eat eggs, lard or dairy products.”

“Italian monks offered pretzels as rewards (their shape symbolizes arms folded in prayer) to children who had learned their prayers,” Musil wrote.

Sarah Pruitt, a contributor to history.com, wrote: “Pretzels were pivotal in 1510, when Ottoman Turks attempted to invade Vienna, Austria, by digging tunnels underneath the city’s walls. Monks baking pretzels in the basement of a monastery heard the enemy’s progress and alerted the rest of the city, then helped defeat the Turkish attack.”

“As a reward, the Austrian emperor – Maximilian I – gave the pretzel bakers their own coat of arms,” she said. The bakers’ shield shows two lions grasping each end of the pretzel dough.

The pretzel shape illustrates the “Staffordshire,” a distinctive three-looped knot, which is the symbol of the County of Staffordshire in England.

In 1614, in Switzerland, couples began using the pretzel in wedding ceremonies to seal the bond of matrimony. This is the origin of the phrase “tying the knot.”

German, Swiss and Italian immigrants were responsible for bringing the pretzel to the American colony of Pennsylvania. Neighborhood bakeries would turn out loads of pretzels for eager customers waiting in line to buy them fresh out of the oven.

In the small hamlet of Lititz, Pa., the town’s baker, William H. Rauch, took in an itinerant worker for a short period of time in 1861. According to the “Legend of Lititz,” the vagabond instructed Rauch’s apprentice, Julius Sturgis, how to prepare “proper pretzels.”

Rauch granted ownership of the baker’s “secret recipe” to Sturgis, who, in turn, opened America’s first commercial pretzel bakery later in 1861 in Lititz. What Sturgis had was the golden formula to extend the “shelf life” of pretzels by hardening them to make them crunchy.

Pruitt commented that Sturgis’ hard pretzels were dagnabbitly revolutionary. “The crispy snacks lasted longer in an airtight container, allowing them to be sold farther away from the bakery itself and to stay fresh longer. Eventually, hard pretzels would come to be even more popular than their soft counterparts,” she said.

Sturgis is the oldest pretzel baking family in America. Today, the Sturgis pretzel baking operations are consolidated at a modern factory in Shillington, Pa., near Reading, about 25 miles from Lititz. At the helm of the business is Bruce Sturgis, a member of the fifth generation in the “first family of pretzels.”

The original Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery is now a Lititz landmark and a tourism attraction. The facility is open daily for tours. The admission fees are less than $4 per person.

Lititz is in Lancaster County, Pa., which cherishes its Amish and Mennonite heritage. Lititz was voted “Coolest Small Town in America” in 2013 – a year after Beaufort, N.C., claimed the crown.

A “sister-city” invite “from us to them” might include an offering of “deep-fried soft pretzels paired with a local Beaufort craft brew.”

Pumpkin reigns supreme as ‘America’s fruit’

Pumpkin season arrived early this year. Coffee shop brewers and baristas began serving up tasty pumpkin-spiced drinks in August.

The Dunkin’ chain of coffee shops (also of doughnut fame) rolled out its “fall menu” of pumpkin flavored nips and nibbles back on Aug. 21, almost a full week before local kiddos returned to school.

Strategically, Dunkin’ officials said they wanted to get the jump on Starbucks, its chief competitor. The move generated a firestorm of news media attention. “Is August the new October?”

Dagbabbit, if Hallmark can start airing its Christmas holiday movies on television in June and July, it seems that anything goes these days. Seasonal distinctions have become blurry and blurrier. I guess it’s no longer necessary to wait for sweater weather to savor your first big swig of a pumpkin-spiced beverage.

Dunkin’ Donuts, based in Canton, Mass., rebranded itself as Dunkin’ in January 2019 as part of its repositioning strategy to become a “beverage-led company.” Daniel S. Levine of Pop Culture Media in Brentwood, Tenn., said part of the Dunkin’ game plan is to encourage customers to add a “pumpkin flavor swirl” to any hot or cold drink as well as frozen treats.

Covering the “pumpkin spice wars” for Prevention magazine, which promotes healthy lifestyles, Tiffany Ayuda reported: “Dunkin’ says its customers’ passion for pumpkin is on the rise, as annual sales for pumpkin-flavored products rose 15.5% in 2018.” The question is: How healthy is Dunkin’s Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Signature Latte?

“With 14 grams of fat and 55 grams of sugar, it doesn’t really belong in the same sentence as ‘healthy’ and should be enjoyed only on special occasions,” said Bonnie Taub-Dix, a registered dietitian nutritionist and author.

“To put this into perspective, one pat of butter has five grams of fat alone, so having this drink is like swallowing three pats of butter,” Taub-Dix says. But there’s more, she says. “One packet of sugar is four grams of sugar, so you would essentially be having 13 packets of sugar stirred into the same drink.” Can you feel your cheeks and tummy bulging out?

Pure pumpkin is good for you. Pumpkin flesh is full of nutrition, “dishing up vitamin C, beta-carotene, fiber and potassium. One half cup of cooked pumpkin provides a day’s supply of vitamin A,” according to nutritionists at Bonnie Plants, a 101-year-old family-owned business, based in Union Springs, Ala.

It’s entirely possible, however, to make pumpkin spice flavoring in the chemistry laboratory, without having any true pumpkin content, according to the folks at SummerWinds Nursery of Boise, Idaho.

History.com tells us that pumpkin is a fruit and a member of the gourd family, which includes cucumbers, honeydew melons, cantaloupe, watermelons and zucchini. Pumpkins are native to North America, but now grow on six continents.

In a 2018 article for The Atlantic magazine, Alexia Fernández Campbell wrote that the beloved pumpkin has been an important crop since the very beginning of American history. It fed “New England’s starving settlers,” keeping them alive when they failed at growing wheat and corn.

The Plymouth colony in Massachusetts was about 10 years old when Capt. Edward Johnson came to America from England in 1630. He is believed to the be the author of the first folk song written on American soil (sometime between 1630-43), familiarly known as “New England’s Annoyances.”

The song was preserved as a historical treasure by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts in 1915, when the esteemed historian Albert Matthews entered it into the historical record (with spelling unedited). These lines tell the pumpkin part of the story:

Our pumkins and parsnips are common supplies;

We have pumkin at morning, and pumkin at noon,

If it was not for pumkins, we should be undoon.

If barley be wanting to make into malt,

We must be contented, and think it no fault,

For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips,

Of pumkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.

Dr. Cynthia Ott, an associate professor of history at the University of Delaware in Newark, said the colonists made “pumpkin beer when there was no barley and pumpkin bread when there was no wheat. Pumpkin was considered a food of desperate times.”

Tale of the tail fins defines 1950s car culture

It’s hard to identify cars by their body shapes any more. Chrysler, Ford and General Motors (GM) products get muddled up with the Toyotas, Nissans, Subarus, Hondas and Hyundais. To my eyes, they all look about the same – especially the silver ones. Distinguishing the model year is next to impossible, even for brainiacs.

Times have changed, dagnabbit. I’ll wager that between 1955 and 1959, during the era that Dinah Shore was singing about Chevrolets, that just about everyone across the U.S.A. could pinpoint the car make, model and year of just about every automobile that cruised along the dirt roads and paved main streets of America.

The cars’ distinctive tail fins were signs of the times. GM’s Cadillac line probably had the biggest and best fins, with the grand prize winner being the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible. It clearly out-finned the field, according to Chris Riley, a writer at AutoWise, a consumer-focused website, based in Rogers, Ark.

Riley consulted Jeff Leestma, an automotive design historian. “That’s as large as the fins ever got, on that ‘59 Caddy,” Leetsma said. “They used a lot of chrome and taillamp pieces that visually reflected the jet age. You would think the car was getting ready to fly away.”

Riley commented that the 1959 Eldorado’s “dual-quad tail lights” mounted on the fins made the vehicle “look like an afterburner lifting a jet off the ground.”

Not everyone loved the look. Tony Davis of Motor News wrote that consumer advocate Ralph Nader once said: “The Caddy fin bore an uncanny resemblance to the tail of the stegosaurus, a dinosaur that had two sharp rearward-projecting horns on each side of the tail.”

Rebeka Knott, a writer with the Groovy History website, said that the popularity of the American automobile exploded in the post-World War II economy. The basic design of automobiles in the early 1950s, however, was rather boring. The prevailing style was termed “fastback,” where the car sloped from its roof to its rear bumper. It looked all right on coupes, but not on sedans.

Car buyers in the mid-1950s wanted their rides to have some zip, pep, pizazz and muscle, according to Knott. “They wanted their cars dripping with chrome – the flashier, the better.”

Jordan Grant of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., said the Cadillac tail fins evolved from the work of GM designer, Franklin Quick Hershey, who pioneered the installation of modest tail fin bumps on the 1948 Cadillacs.

Kevin Ransom of Autoblog, an automotive news and car shopping website based in Birmingham, Mich., defined the tail-fin trend as “jet age one-upmanship, as GM and Chrysler locked themselves into an ‘arms race’ of sorts to see who could bring the biggest, most dashing, most attention-getting tail fins to market.”

Grant stated: “Tail fins were a style with a purpose, and the purpose was simple: sell more cars. In order to keep their financial engines running, car makers had to convince customers to upgrade their vehicles year after year, even if the cars in their driveways were still running fine.”

“The simplest way to push consumers toward new cars was the time-tested practice of ‘planned obsolescence’ – creating products that rapidly became obsolete. Every year, auto manufacturers released a new annual model that differed very little mechanically from the previous generation but did showcase a dramatically different style,” Grant said. “The clearest change year to year was the size and shape of the tail fins on each model.” Nobody did it better than Cadillac.

Chrysler’s tail fin specialist was Virgil Exner. He did some of his finest work on DeSoto models. Riley’s favorite fin design is found on the 1959 DeSoto. Each fin was stacked with three tail lights that “looked like they belonged on a jet.”

By the end of the decade, Chevrolet decided to take the whole fin experience in a different direction with the fins on its Impala model, Riley commented. Instead of the straight, pointed fins, the Impala featured horizontal “gull-wing” or “bat-wing” fins that were paired with “cat-eye” taillights.

“These were voluptuous fins that invoked drama and excitement,” Riley remarked. “They made the 1959 Chevy one of the most easily recognized cars of the entire decade.”