Thanksgiving Table 2016: Bow Enjoys a Thanksgiving Feast

What is Bow's favorite thing at Thanksgiving? I have been asked. He has not answered this question definitively, but his three favorites are the bubbly red grape juice, the pumpkin pie and the cranberry sauce. All are fairly sweet, and Bow has a sweet tooth.

Bow was happy to have another visit with his grandma, and he settled down to having her here without displaying or making too much noise. He knows her and recognizes that she is part of his family, and he looks forward to Thanksgiving every year.

This year, I made the pumpkin pie and the cranberry sauce. My mother prepared all the other food.

Here is a video of my mother slicing the yams.

The first thing that Bow asked for was the Welch's sparkling red grape juice.

He took his sweet time drinking it, too.

He wanted to enjoy it down to the very last drop. When he requested it, he called it " שתיה", which is just the Hebrew word for "a drink."

The next thing Bow asked for was the pumpkin pie. He called it עוגה. That's just a general word that covers both cake and pie.

You can hear my mother and me talking in the background, while Bow has his pumpkin pie. After that, I offered him a turkey leg, but he said it was "סתם", meaning nothing special. He wanted the cranberry sauce, instead. He called it "אדום", which means "red".

After that, Bow was full, so he asked to go outside. The rest of the family proceeded with our Thanksgiving feast at a more leisurely pace. A good time was had by all.

Bow's Thanksgiving 2015

Bow sips of sparkling grape juice

Bow enjoyed his Thanksgiving feast yesterday.

Bow's main Thanksgiving courses prepared by Grandma

As usual, Bow's grandmother is visiting us for Thanksgiving this year, and it is largely due to her culinary skills that we had such great food to eat.

The only thing not made by Grandma was the pumpkin pie, which we ordered from  a local church group

The only thing not made by my mother was the pumpkin pie, which we bought from a local church group. Bow's dessert consisted of  slice of pumpking pie and  a mincemeat cookie baked by Grandma.

Bow's dessert

Bow chose all the sweet things to eat first. He started with the cranberry sauce, which is his favorite.

He ate the pie and mincemeat cookie so fast that it was hard to capture a good shot.

The turkey leg met with limited success. Then it was on to the stuffing, which he ate more slowly.

I made a short montage of key moments in Bow's Thanksgiving feast this year. It has been increasingly difficult for me to upload longer sequences, so this is a good way to compress time and show all the fine eating.

I hope you enjoyed the film and that your Thanksgiving was just as magical.

A Fine Feast

Bow loves Thanksgiving, and he knows when it is coming. He sees the guests arriving, and he sees the culinary preparations, and he knows. This year we had Grandma and Bow's cousin, as well as my daughter and myself and Bow, which is plenty of a crowd for the inner pen.

While my mother worked in the kitchen, and the cousins played video games, Bow watched me set up the long serving table and pile it with the desserts and the extra stuffing.

Though Bow and I like pumpkin pie, by popular demand we only had cheesecake and poppy seed cake this year.

Though Bow was interested in the table and the food already on it, he was aware that all the important action was going on in the house, and he often gestured at the door to the living room to draw my attention.

My mother did a great job with the turkey and all the fixings. In no time at all, Bow was enjoying a drumstick of his own.

And he really enjoyed the sparkling cranberry juice!

 Down to the last drop!

These days, Bow is not as endearing to the guests, in terms of polite chit-chat. He is just concerned with keeping things on schedule, including each course of the meal, and even the cleanup. He enforces his own bedtime, too!

It was a very fine feast and a happy Thanksgiving Day for all.

The Tupperware Problem and the Thanksgiving Snake

Thanksgiving is a time of abundance. We prepare more than enough food, but it's okay, because the leftovers last for several days.

There is the turkey and the pumpkin pie, the stuffing and the yams, and the cranberry sauce.

We eat until we are stuffed, and still there is plenty left over. This year, even Bow realized he did not need to finish it all in one sitting. He did not really work that hard on the turkey and the stuffing, focusing more on the cranberry sauce and the sparkling red grape juice.

When everybody has had their fill and they are just too sleepy and tuckered out for any more digestive effort, that is when we break out the Tupperware. I have to dig deep to try to find the covers to all the containers, so that everything is properly put away, ready to be eaten slowly over the next week. 

Invariably, some containers are found for which there are no covers, and some covers are found for which there is no container. Nevertheless, I managed to put everything away last night, with only a few mismatched items of Tupperware remaining, when I spotted that ribbon in the hallway that seemed out of place. 

I think I actually walked over it first, then did a double take. Not a ribbon. A snake!

Of course, what I normally do when I find a snake I need to transport from one location to another is to break out the Tupperware. I usually look for a container that will easily accommodate that particular snake. But this was Thanksgiving! All my really good Tupperware was in use and filled to the brim with goodies. I had just put everything away in the refrigerator! The only thing left were the badly mismatched containers and lids. And here was this snake!

By the time I grabbed the best container and lid I could find, the Thanksgiving snake was already making plans to escape my clutches. But I had my mother and daughter to think of, neither of whom are particularly fond of snakes.

I had to capture the snake and transport him outside before he hid somewhere in the house, only to emerge at the worst possible moment. So I pushed him with my badly chosen rectangular lid into the the circcular opening of the container I had and gingerly held the lid over the container.

I don't have pictures of this, but at one point the snake's tail was hanging outside the container while the head and majority of his body were inside. Luckily, he decided to cooperate and tucked his tail into the container, accommodating himself to its shape, so that I could press the mismatched lid firmly onto the container.

Then I transported him outside and a little way from the house. When I removed the lid, he seemed happy to escape into the night.

Any other time of the year, I have plenty of Tupperware for snakes. But on Thanksgiving day, there is only that mismatched Tupperware left. Luckily, the snake was understanding, and he cooperated even when my containers were not absolutely right for the task. That is something to be thankful for!

The Gift of a Glove

My mother is spending a week with us, so we can celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday together. Bow and my mother have a special relationship, one that has grown over the years. When I first started Project Bow, my mother was not thrilled about it, but as Bow has  matured, while he's alienated a lot of people, surprisingly he has won my mother over.

My mother spoke to us over the phone before her visit this year, and she told Bow she was going to bring him a present when she came. Sure, enough, on the first day of the visit, my mother announced that she had a gift for Bow. At first, Bow did not seem interested, but after a while he took my hand and spelled out, rather primly, that he would like to see the present after all.

My mother brought out a little plastic elephant, and eventually, I passed it along to Bow. He accepted the gift, put it aside, and then proceeded to interact with my mother. In time, he played with the elephant, although the playing mostly consisted of mouthing it. Every once in a while the elephant lost part of its anatomy: the tip of its tail, then each of its tusks, then some part of a foot.

Did Bow enjoy the present? Yes, but he seemed to enjoy more the fact that my mother had given it to him. That was on Tuesday.

The next day at breakfast, my mother had two other gifts for Bow. One was a small piece of chocolate. (She had shared the same kind of chocolate with me and Sword the night before, after Bow went to bed.) The second gift was a small metallic packet of peanuts that she got on the airplane on the way here. Bow had trouble opening the packet, but he appreciated the peanuts very much. He actually went out of his way to say "Thank you, Grandma."

This morning, Thanksgiving Day, my mother came into the pens for breakfast carrying a small cardboard box, and Bow kept looking at it all during breakfast. Finally, after the meal was over, he motioned that he had something to say, then took my hand and spelled: "Why doesn't Grandma give Bow the present?"

My mother had no idea what he was talking about. "What present?" Then we realized that Bow probably thought the package she had carried in with her this morning was a present for him. My mother hastened to explain: "No, Bow this isn't a present. These are just some things I need to help me prepare the turkey."

Bow was reluctant to accept this explanation, but he eventually let the subject go.

All morning long, my mother worked on the Thanksgiving Feast in the kitchen, and Bow was very impatient. (My main culinary contribution of the day was the boiled eggs I prepared in advance to help tide us over.)

When my mother announced that the meal was ready and I started carrying the food in, Bow emitted lots of excited food cries. Nobody appreciates food as much as Bow.

After the meal, when Sword had already left to do her own thing, my mother and I stayed and talked about how tender the turkey had been this year, and my mother, picking up the oven mitt that was lying on the table, said: "This is a really good oven mitt. I would buy one for myself, but I seldom cook anymore."  (It was an oven mitt she had given me a few years back, an 'Ove' Glove. ) And then we talked about a lot of other things, family memories, previous meals, while Bow chewed his cud happily.

After about an hour of this, Bow motioned for me to come in with him, because he had something to say. He took my hand and spelled: "Give Grandma a present."

This surprised me. "You think I should give Grandma a present?"

"Yes."

"What should I give her?"

He spelled in Hebrew:   ".תני לה דוקא כפפה"

The word davka is one that is hard to translate. Bow had said: "Give her davka a glove." Now roughly translated, that means: "It's exactly a glove that you should give her!" or "Of all the things you should give her, a glove is the one." Or "In fact, it's a glove you should give her." There's no such word as davka in English, but that's what it means.

My mother and I exchanged glances. "I think he means the oven mitt, " I said. I pointed at the mitt and asked: "Is this the glove I should give her?"

"Yes," Bow spelled.

I went over to the other side and presented my mother with the glove. "Bow would like you to have this as a present."

"Thank you, Bow," my mother said. "That's so thoughtful of you!"

Thanksgiving: "Yes, I see [a] party!"

Lawrence was here the day before Thanksgiving, to sit with Bow while my mother and I prepared things for the feast. They could both see the kitchen, from inside the pens, and Bow likes to watch. He was feeling very talkative that day, and Lawrence reports that he even used his touchscreen. At one point, Bow poked  the computer with his chopstick until he got it to say: "Yes, I see party."

"I see party?" I repeated when Lawrence told me.

"Yeah. That's what it sounded like. I didn't actually see what he spelled."

Bow contrives to spell things on the computer when Lawrence is not looking. So, it is entirely possible that the "see" was spelled "C". But the "yes" and the "party" would be hard to achieve any other way than spelling them out. And let's face it "I" and the letter "I" are already a shortcut in normal spelling.

Now, people who claim chimps do not have syntax could make a really big deal of how there was no article in front of the word "party". I assure you, however, that Bow left that out because of difficulty with typing, and not because he doesn't know grammar. For that matter, having articles in front of nouns is not a universal of human language. Lots of language don't have them at all. Hebrew has a definite article and not an indefinite one. One might have supposed it was a question of fluency with English. But those of us who know Bow really well know his English is better than that. Using the touchscreen is hard. I sometimes leave out articles when I type, too.

As for the semantics of what he said, you kind of have to understand the context, too.We so seldom have people over, even just family, that to Bow seeing me and my mother and Sword talking, and laughing and working in the kitchen preparing a Thanksgiving feast seemed like a "party".

Thanksgiving day was just family: Sword, Bow, my mother and me. Bow and Sword each got a turkey leg, so that neither could claim I was favoring the other. The other favorite thing among the younger generation was cranberry sauce. Here are some candid shots I took with my laptop's built in camera: