Sharon Fiffer
Nellie, my generally unsentimental mother, almost always weakened when I begged for decorative doodads like these candles. On our Saturday shopping trips to downtown Kankakee, we made the obligatory rounds through Kresge's or McClellan’s dime store--or both--and I would point and beg and Nellie would soften. After all, I had made the rounds with her though the dress shops she liked. While she browsed the racks at Lecour's, Samuel's, Hecht's and Bon Marche, I would sit patiently if there was a chair, make faces in the full length mirrors if there wasn't.
It was easy to be patient when I knew the dime stores or Matt's Toy and Hobby or the Kankakee Bookstore were in my future. Most Saturdays ended with a twofer--candy from Carolyn Johnson's chocolate shop, then comic books at the I. C. Drug Store where my mother used the pay phone to call my dad to pick us up.
Reading over that last paragraph, I realize I mentioned so many things that would have to be explained to my grandchildren. A dime store? A pay phone? Well...back in the day....
Also back in the day, these little holiday candles popped up in the stores. Orange waxy pumpkins and black cats in October; Christmas trees, elves and Santas in December. All were about three inches tall and begged not to be lit, but instead to be wrapped up in tissue and stuck in a shoebox marked, HOLIDAY.
Thanksgiving candles in November were mostly turkeys. But these two relics, pilgrims, seemed a little more special to me. After all, I had been told the story of the first Thanksgiving at school, and if there were grown up pilgrims making friends with Native Americans and sharing food, certainly there must have been little kid pilgrims saying grace over the feast, too.
Of course, now we know better. Those friendly pilgrims taking over the land from the Native Americans, well that wasn't much discussed when I was a kid. Starvation, cruelty, colonialism, racism didn't usually have a place at the holiday table. The biggest debates were over oysters or no oysters in the stuffing; canned jellied cranberry sauce or fresh cranberry relish?
These little pilgrims are certainly out of a myth, far from realistic and, being made of wax, have seen better days as artifacts. However, it is their waxy deterioration that intrigues me. Because they are softening and losing their details, the little boy's eyes are no longer "complete." The flaking on his face is now causing him to give his prayerful friend the side eye, as if to say he knows this whole Thanksgiving story is bunk.
It's probably time to retire these two permanently. If the grandchildren are here asking questions, it's probably a lot easier to explain what a pay phone was than trying to tell the true story of Pocahontas and John Alden and Priscilla Mullins.