When the clock strikes nine on the night before the holiday, the eldest daughter tucks the little ones under extra quilts, kisses each of them the way her mother would, and climbs into her own bed without minding the small drifts of snow sifting onto her coverlet through the roof shingles. The old mastiff lies down across the door as if he knows he is needed. And by the dying fire the cat sits upright beside the spinning wheel, “like some sort of household goblin, guarding the children while they slept,” as Alcott puts it. An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott is about that night and the day that follows, when seven farm children with no adult at home decide that a feast is still a feast.
The setup is quick. A passing rider brings word that the children’s grandmother, twenty miles off near Keene, is failing, and their parents leave by sleigh with the baby just as a storm comes over the New Hampshire hills. The story is short enough for a single sitting, and it is freely available online in the public domain. It first reached book form in 1882 as the title piece of the sixth Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag collection, and illustrated editions for younger children still appear each autumn.
The Girl Who Raised the Turkey
The bold eldest girl drives the plot, but the character worth remembering in An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott is Prue, the quiet one. While her sisters mourn the lost visit to the cousins, she admits she would rather eat at home in the warm, and Alcott compares her to a cat that loves its own corners. When the giant bird lies plucked on the platter and her sister confesses to being a little afraid of it, Prue laughs that she fed him all summer and he never once gobbled at her. She feels mean, she says, to be thinking of gobbling him now, and then she pats him with an expression the narrator describes as half affection and half appetite. It is a perfect small joke about farm life, where pets and dinners are not always separate categories.
Prue is the patient one, the steady baster, the girl whose framed childhood sampler hangs in the best room with its rainbow of mismatched thread. Her elder sister wants to be admired; Prue wants everyone fed. The story is generous to both temperaments and lets the difference carry real comic weight when the cooking begins.
That cooking is the heart of the piece. Alcott lets the reader watch mistakes as they are made. The plum pudding gets every spice in the house, just to be safe, and brandy instead of wine, but no sugar and no salt, and it is tied into its cloth so tightly it has no room to swell. The narrator, with cheerful cruelty, tells the reader exactly what that means long before anyone at the table finds out. That is the governing pleasure of An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott: dramatic irony on a kitchen scale, with the audience a step ahead of the cooks.
An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving in Country Voices
What makes the tale worth reading aloud rather than summarising is the talk. The Bassetts speak a thick rural New England idiom: victuals, yarbs for herbs, jedgment, darst, a household that has been chorin’ ’round since dawn. When the mother leaves, she trails a stream of orders behind the sleigh, about extra comfortables for the beds, beans for dinner and keeping the boys away from the mince pies, and the speech reads like something Alcott actually overheard. A nervous cook calls herself dubersome. A small boy who has eaten only one bowl of hasty pudding at breakfast explains that he is saving room.
This is also the story’s practical hurdle. Read silently, the dialect is a joy. Read aloud to a young audience, it requires a performer willing to commit, and a few phrases will need translating mid-sentence. Families who take on An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott will find that the voices are the point.
What the Story Leaves Out
The reservations about An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott are real, if modest. Beyond the two elder girls and their brother, the children barely separate. The twins share their lines and their fears, and the two small boys exist mainly to eat, climb furniture and shout. The adults are thinner still: the father is a coat, blue mittens and a set of instructions, and the mother vanishes for most of the action. In a story this short that is partly unavoidable, but it means the cast is three people deep.
The resolution, too, is tidier than the opening promises. It arrives with the neatness of a fable and closes on a family devotional that some households will find lovely and others will find preachy. And the story belongs to its era in several particulars, among them period language in children’s games, an unwanted kiss played as comedy and an easy familiarity with firearms around the young, all of which a parent reading aloud may want to pause over.
The Writer Behind Louisa May Alcott’s Holiday Tale
Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in November 1832, and died in Boston in March 1888, only two days after her father, the philosopher Bronson Alcott. By the early 1880s her life had changed sharply. Her youngest sister May died abroad, weeks after giving birth at the end of 1879, and in September 1880 the baby, named Louisa and called Lulu, arrived in Concord to be raised by her aunt. This story, with its makeshift mother of fourteen running a house, was written while Alcott herself was learning that role late.
An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott first appeared in St. Nicholas, the children’s monthly edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, author of Hans Brinker. It was Dodge’s request for a new serial in 1882 that got the long-stalled Jo’s Boys moving again.
It is worth remembering, too, that in 1879 Alcott became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, for a school board election. The girls in her stories are rarely decorative, and the Bassett sisters, flour to the elbows and in sole command of a farmhouse, are no exception.
After the Last Page
Taken as what it is, a short, warm, slightly bossy period sketch, An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott succeeds. Its plot is thin and its moral arrives on schedule, but the texture of a working farmhouse on the busiest day of its year has rarely been caught with such affection. It is best shared aloud once the holiday dishes are done and the household has settled by the fire.
Readers who want the March family remade for a darker modern mood can turn to Little Monsters by Máire Roche, which sends the sisters into foster care in present-day Salem. So Far Gone by Jess Walter offers the adult version of a holiday meal going sideways, with far sharper knives on the table. And Tom Lake by Ann Patchett gathers a family at home on an orchard to tell old stories, which is exactly the mood in which the Bassetts’ snowbound day deserves to be heard.
Somewhere in that farmhouse, the cat is presumably still on watch.