These are some very tough times and sometimes getting involved in a community project can go a long way in smoothing things out. The Mackenzie Elementary School recently  posted a 10 Weeks of Giving Program to support the School’s Backpack Program. 

Thankfully, the school-based Program has been around for years and it is basically a food insecurities program where the School’s Nurse Tracy Whitney and Counselor Michelle Gallo fill about sixteen backpacks every Friday afternoon so those students who need food assistance will have something to eat over the weekend. 

Every child at the School receives free breakfast and lunch during the school year. During the ten weeks the Program is requesting their most needed shelf-stable and canned goods, apple sauce and fruit cups, peanut butter and jelly, cereals, oatmeal, pancake mix and syrup, rice mixes, canned tuna and canned chicken, boxed macaroni and cheese, breakfast and granola bars and healthy snacks. Plastic jars are appreciated since the children need to carry the supplies home with them.

Thanksgiving starts the holiday season in our country and Americans gather with the family and friends and have a gut busting turkey dinner and all the fixings and over their meal share what they are most thankful for from the previous year. Some celebrate the day by watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (it’s the 98th year of the parade) or a football game.  

The holiday and its traditions behind it have evolved from the much mythologized from the 1621 harvest feast when the Mayflower pilgrims who founded the first Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts sat down for a three-day feast with the local Wampanoags. 

When the pilgrims arrived in the Fall of 1620, they had seriously underestimated the amount of food needed to maintain the new Colony and had little food to survive on so they robbed corn from the local Native Americans’ graves and storehouses. However, the meal wasn’t part of a peace treaty to settle past grievances but most likely just a routine English traditional harvest celebration. 

Unfortunately, by 1637 the détente between the pilgrims and the Wampanoag had all but disappeared and the pilgrims started a decades-long war with their Indigenous neighbors. Over the centuries the word “thanksgiving” has changed its meaning and has evolved from the prominent post-Civil War era featuring patriotic and religious gatherings to the modern holiday that focuses on good food, entertainment and spending time with family.

It is the hope of the staff of the school that during Thanksgiving holiday season the children in the Program will be able to get a Thanksgiving Dinner Basket with turkey and all the fixings that will meet the needs of the entire family to have a wonderful holiday dinner. 

If you want to donate to the special Thanksgiving Baskets, all donations must be in check form and have to be made to the school- George Ross Mackenzie Elementary School, 1045 Proctor Road, Post Office Box 249, Glen Spey, NY 12737-ATTN: E.C.S. GRM Elementary Backpack Program. You may also drop off a check at the School during their regular hours.