We all have the bad taste from the bitter election, so let’s turn the page where we find American Colonial history and the names of William Bradford, governor of Plymouth, and Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, and a three-day celebration of the first Thanksgiving!

“Falcons Wing, Turkey Pole Down take us back to Old Plymouth Town …” — Aunt Clara in the episode of the “Bewitched” TV show, “A Thanksgiving to Remember,” on Nov. 23, 1967.

Telling gobbler’s tales in front of a hearth with a flickering bright fire glowing, giving off the warmth of love during the holidays is a family tradition. I cherish stories weaved from my distant ancestors’ time about the frontier bogeyman Simon Girty, who stole children in the dark of the night if they were not good.

Some kin were living locally, including one who lived through the deep snow and bitter cold during the winter of 1786-87. Others had endured the bitter snowy, coldest winters of the 1770s at places like Valley Forge as the Little Ice Age unfolded.

A person can use one’s imagination to envision the wonderment of overwintering at Fort Steuben, which was built in 1786, or in a lone cabin along the Ohio River and waking up in the Valley Frontier 1786-87 on a mattress and pillow of goose feathers set up against wilderness snow a foot deep from November until March. A white liquid moon was still in a cold flush sky with snow blanketed the backwoods forest as a canvas seeing “wolves who sat upon their tayles and grinned at us and driven back into the woods a little bit” near Fort Pitt, musket in hand into the sunrise that was illuminating the thicket burning off the frost spirit not long before shoe-wearing time when the autumn crops had been harvested, filling woodsplint baskets with wild purpling grapes and browning nuts near a rich-dark heartwood tree now covered in an ice glaze along a frozen creek bank where I might find myself a league from the home fire in search of a wild turkey for this bountiful day.

Much of my inspiration is drawn from Nathaniel Philbrick Mayflower’s novel, which owes much to listening to the cries of the Indians found in Richard A. Rath’s book, “How Early America Sounded” — the chapter, “The Howling Wilderness,” pp 145-72.

It was a time before football and the Macy’s Parade when a well-tattered-edge Bible read daily sat in the corner above the old chimney with a black bake kettle and bean pot filled with the bounty from the gathering in of planting season cooked over the fire by wood brought in as part of the previous night chores. If we are industrious, we shall never starve; for, as Poor Richard’s 1758 Almanack says, “At the working Man’s House Hunger looks in, but dares not enter.”

In the middle of the dough out is an old log peg table with a few wooden trencher’s plates and drinking noggin mugs. Granny baked fresh loaves before dawn in the morning from homemade dough, Indian corn and greens. Near a chair, alone, the milking bucket is empty now as a young girl did the churning before first light.

I was still in short pants and a barefoot boy born too late to recall the Ohio Valley’s great snowstorm of 1950. Rather, the little boy in me recalls winter memories that seem to be from January 1964. Looking forward to the time when night had overtaken the day when I would look out the window frosted over from the persistent autumn winds as a length of smoke was seen issuing from a snow-covered rooftop of neighbors that decorated the sky.

On this last Thursday of November, empty chairs once occupied by parents and grandparents encircle the rustic table decorated with a variety of pumpkins nestled amidst lush foliage dinner plates bordered with a harvest garden of oak leaves and acorns, that only Martha Stewart could truly appreciate.

In the predawn hours holding a lit tallow candle to check on the thawing bird in the ice box for just a moment, I could hear the spirits of days of yore that seemed to speak of the Ghost of Thanksgiving Past as the singing of “The New-England Boy’s Song” begins about Thanksgiving Day, which was read with all joining in at its conclusion, “Hurrah for the pumpkin pie.”

Happy Thanksgiving from yesterday’s child.

(Traubert is a resident of Wellsburg)