Happy Thanksgiving!
Normally I write about women’s lost stories, but this time I wrote about a memory of my Dad’s growing up in Brooklyn, New York. It was published just today in New Jersey’s Star Ledger.
“Did I ever take you begging for Thanksgiving?”
We were sitting around the dinner table the night before Thanksgiving about ten years ago, when Dad casually asked this question.
I did a double-take. “What on earth are you talking about?”
When Dad was a boy in the early 1950s living on Grant Avenue in Brooklyn, now known as East New York, he and his friends would dirty their faces and dress up in their worst clothes to resemble hobos on Thanksgiving morning, and then knock on the neighbors’ doors to beg for spare change and candy by asking “Anything for Thanksgiving?”
My mother, who’d grown up in Glendale, Queens, was flabbergasted.
“Are you sure you’re not thinking of Halloween?” I asked. He was still 100% lucid back then.
“No, definitely Thanksgiving morning,” he said. “We called it Ragamuffin Day.”
My mother shook her head……
Read the rest of the article here.
I have much to be grateful for, including two wonderful parents.
Wishing you and yours all the best this holiday season.
Gina Buonaguro 