PRACTICAL PARSIMONY: Cost of Thanksgiving the Year You Were Born + Getting Ready

Monday, November 20, 2017

Cost of Thanksgiving the Year You Were Born + Getting Ready

This Thanksgiving I will not be buying a turkey or a turkey breast. I was given another hen. That makes three! I wonder if I can get three hens in a turkey bag. It seems chicken and dumpling is in my future sometime in the next ten days. I will freeze what I cannot eat, make broth, freeze it and make the chicken and dumplings later.

The two I got earlier will go together in the turkey bag and into the oven. The hen I just got will go into the crock pot for the chicken and dumplings.

I was also a recipient of three more pounds of sweet potatoes and three pounds of white potatoes. This was from the church that requires no means test.

This was a crazy time to cook the ground beef for exbf. I got almost five pounds and have made four helpings of meat loaf, four helpings of the taco casserole that ends up more like soup. I still have the other third of the ground beef for something else. He will take this home, all frozen in pint freezer bags. Since we will eat Thanksgiving dinner out, I will be cooking hens later. He can eat a Thanksgiving dinner at my house the next week and take home leftovers, too.

This cost of Thanksgiving article does not start on my birth year, just the year after. In 70 years the price of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 has certainly risen. I wonder if the cost to my parents seemed as hard to come by as the price for this year will be difficult for some people. I think it was less than $6 for the year after I was born. For 2016 the price was almost $50. Cost of Thanksgiving

I love the pictures of ordinary people preparing their Thanksgiving meal or sitting down to eat.

How much was Thanksgiving Dinner the year you were born?

2 comments:

VickiNovember 20, 2017 at 6:05 AM
Because it is difficult for me to go out, it will be just Duane and me for Thanksgiving this year. He received a grocery gift card from his workplace that covered the price of the turkey with quite a bit left over and the rest comes from my canning shelves and pantry, so the cash outlay was zero. You and I are close to the same age, so the cost back then would be the same.
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Okay, hoping the annoyances have gone away.

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The Cast

Fancy is my favorite hen. She is one of the three youngest hens I adopted. Because she is so gentle and friendly, she may be the one I rescued when she was being pecked to death after she could no longer stand. She got to live in the house in a box. Sometimes, I let her sit in my lap while she was convalescing. Now, she comes to sit in the swing with me, cuddling up to my body like a cat or dog. She died in February 2012.

Fancy follows me begging, complaining, needing me to do for her. She talks to me in various voices. She allows me to pick her up and carry her. When she became an adult, her head was a darker red and her body was light brown. Around her neck were tips of black feathers. It appeared she had a necklace of jet around her neck. When I showed this characteristic to a friend, he said, "Oh, you have fancy chickens and plain chickens."

Chessie has a broken toe. I broke it! She had a habit of jumping really high and almost sticking. A raccoon ate her in October 2009.

Thelma is the blonde. She is also the largest hen and the alpha hen. I suspect the gigantic eggs are from her. She often squats and presents herself to me. She is top hen, but I suspect she knows she had better be deferent to top feeder of the flock--me.

Louise is the auburn-feathered hen. She looks like the true Rhode Island Reds in pictures. She is almost as large as Thelma. Some days I suspect she is trying to be top chicken. When I got Pepper, I found out Louise is the Alpha hen.

Pepper came here from the same home as the first four. We were discussing putting red pepper on their food, wondering if it really would increase egg production. Pepper is the only name we agreed on. She is terrorized each day by Louise. Even after the worst was over, she was and is still filled with terror and very wary.

Linda is owned by four hens. They allow her to fetch for them. She loves them dearly, so she allows them to boss her around. Linda comes out in the rain to perform chores for them and make sure they have food and water. She begs scraps from all sorts of places to make sure they have fresh fruits and vegetables.

Parsimony is not a vegetable

Parsimony is extreme care in spending money. Stick around and learn about my random thoughts on accomplishing goals economically--dumpster diving aka safari, gleaning, do-it-yourself, sewing tips, recipes, and whatever is happening in my life.

Okay so maybe "parsimony" is not your thing. How about thrift, frugality or just plain saving money? I try not to go the tightwad route as that seems to imply others will suffer from my habits.

Some of my not-spending habits have very much been a part of my lifelong habits. Other habits are newly acquired and are an extension of my lifelong not-spending habits.

I am very imaginative when it comes to substituting or making instead of buying. I will tell you about making a heater for the chickens' water. Not one dime was spent since I had everything I needed right in my basement.

Practicality must rear its head alongside parsimony. For example, I will use the dryer in bad weather or because of allergies in the spring. But, I will not wash clothes in a tub as long as I have a washing machine or can find one.

You may hear more about my four Rhode Island Red hens than you care to hear. They lay delicious brown eggs.

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Monday, November 20, 2017

Cost of Thanksgiving the Year You Were Born + Getting Ready

2 comments: