Thanksgiving Is Coming.....

Just 4 weeks till Thanksgiving. Its my favorite holiday and is the quintessential American festival. This is a harvest festival where we give thanks to God for the bounty that he has provided to us over the past year.

In addition to the religious overtones, Thanksgiving represents a family gathering time, more important to me than Christmas that has transformed into a secular holiday. It also is the beginning of winter, and is the end of the Fall season, my favorite time of year. I enjoy the changing colors of the leaves and the cool crisp air that marks autumn.

On the 24th, I will go to the American Club here and enjoy the Thanksgiving feast with my friends and family. I very much look forward to it. I particularly look forward to cranberry sauce. I don't really like the jellied version that comes in a can but the homemade variety where the raw berries are stewed with sugar. My mother makes it with less sugar than traditionally recipes suggest and the sauce is more tart and lively as a result.

Cranberries are a very strange fruit. They grow in bogs and swamps and are very difficult to harvest.

The cranberries are a group of evergreen dwarf shrubs in the genus Vaccinium subgenus Oxycoccus, or in some treatments, in the distinct genus Oxycoccus. They are found in acidic bogs throughout the cooler parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Cranberries are low, creeping shrubs to 10 cm tall (often less), with slender, wiry stems, not thickly woody, and small evergreen leaves. The flowers are dark pink, with very distinct reflexed petals, leaving the style and stamens fully exposed and pointing forward. The fruit is a berry that is larger than the leaves of the plant. It is initially white, but turns a deep red when fully ripe.

The name cranberry probably derives from their being a favorite food of cranes, though some sources claim the name comes from "craneberry" because before the flower expands, its stem, calyx, and petals resembled the neck, head, and bill of a crane. Another name, used in northeastern Canada, is mossberry.

So I am amused to see that someone has come up with a machine to assist in the harvesting effort.

His invention-five years in the making-promises a much faster way to harvest the popular fruit that is a staple of Thanksgiving Day tables and a $200 million-a-year industry.

"If it works as well as it appears it does, yes, it will revolutionize cranberry harvesting," said Teryl Roper, a fruits crop specialist and professor of horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "I don't know why no one thought of it before. It is elegantly simple."

An invention that won't make the inventor rich, but his "ruby slipper" will surely make him famous among cranberry growers and aficionados.