Happy Thanksgiving to American readers of Tentaclii.
For some reason S.T. Joshi does not index ‘Thanksgiving’, this lack possibly being an indexer’s convention. But I’ve picked out a few examples in which Lovecraft mentions it. First, here again is Lovecraft’s celebration of a Thanksgiving meal made by Sonia in New York City…
Enchanted soup — apotheosised roast turkey with dressing of chestnuts & all the rare spices & savoury herbs that camel-caravans with tinkling bells bring secretly from forgotten orients of eternal spring across the deserts beyond the Oxus — cauliflower with cryptical creaming — cranberry sauce with the soul of Rhode Island bogs in it — salads that emperors have dreamed into reality — sweet potatoes with visions of pillar’d Virginia plantation-houses — gravy for which Apicius strove & Lucullus sigh’d in vain — plum pudding such as Irving never tasted at Bracebridge Hall — & to crown the feast, a gorgeous mince pie fairly articulate with memories of New-England fireplaces & cold-cellars. All the glory of earth sublimated in one transcendent repast — one divides one’s life into periods of before & after having consumed — or even smelled or dream’d of — such a meal!
Later, as if to celebrate 18 months of safe ensconcement in Providence following his New York nightmare, Lovecraft feasted mightily in November 1927. As he wrote to Donald Wandrei…
To parallel your Morphean [Morpheus, god of sleep] achievement of last Sunday, I can cite my own performance of last night – when, gorged with a Thanksgiving feast of the utmost peril to my 140-lb standard, I was overcome by drowsiness at 5p.m … & continu’d in a somnolent state till ten this morning! My dreams occasionally approach’d the phantastical in character. tho’ falling somewhat short of coherence.
In an April 1928 letter to Talman (presumably begun in 1927 and then added to slowly) he revealed…
our whole family had a Thanksgiving dinner with the Brennans this year
… by which he presumably refers to November 1927, so the blow-out must have been there. They appear, from his following accent in the letter, to have been of Irish descent. At a guess they may have been childhood friends from the Blackstone Band days, or neighbours. They don’t appear in the index of Letters to Family.
In November 1932 he told Robert E. Howard…
My really favourite meal is the regular old New England turkey dinner, with highly seasoned dressing, cranberry sauce, onions, etc., and mince pie for dessert.
And in 1934 he achieved a long-held Thanksgiving hope, though he doesn’t say exactly where or with whom…
[This] Thanksgiving I did something I have been wanting to do all my life — consumed the traditional feast on this historic soil of ancient Plymouth (less than 40 miles from here), where the whole custom started 312 years ago.
So far as I know he knew no writer or relations in Plymouth, but it’s not impossible that he had fallen into conversation with antiquarians while exploring the place, had expressed his wish and been invited.