In November 1881 the children’s magazine St. Nicholas opened its new volume with a story by the most famous writer for girls in America. Its first words looked backwards: sixty years backwards, to a farmhouse in the New Hampshire hills where deer still roamed the woods and nobody had heard of a railroad. An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott was already a period piece the day it was printed. Alcott, nearly forty-nine and famous for Little Women, was not describing her own childhood holidays. She was imagining her grandparents’ generation, and she wanted her young readers to feel the difference.

Where This Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving Sits in Alcott’s Work

This is a short story, around 7,300 words, comfortably read aloud in one long evening or alone in under an hour. Roberts Brothers of Boston gathered Alcott’s shorter children’s fiction into six volumes called Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag between 1872 and 1882. This story heads the sixth and final volume, which takes its title. The whole collection is free and in the public domain, and the easiest place to read it is the Project Gutenberg edition of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag VI. Several illustrated picture-book versions are also in print, including the 2005 HarperCollins edition illustrated by James Bernardin, which is shortened and adapted rather than the full text.

It is a Thanksgiving story in the plainest sense: the holiday is the plot. On the day before the feast, a rider brings word that Mrs. Bassett’s mother is failing, and the parents leave by sleigh into a gathering storm. Fourteen-year-old Tilly is left holding her mother’s keys, her sixteen-year-old brother Eph is left holding the farm, and five younger siblings are left holding a great many opinions about dinner.

A Kitchen With No Grown-Ups

What the piece adds to Alcott’s work is a kind of comic logistics. In Little Women the March girls cook a disastrous dinner too, but it is a lesson staged by their mother. Here there is no Marmee waiting to explain the moral. Tilly is a fourteen-year-old who wants both the job and the credit, and An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott follows her through every decision a real cook would face: whether to open the best parlor to keep the little ones out from underfoot, which herbs go in turkey stuffing, whether a pet pig can decently be roasted. Prue, sent to the dark garret for sweet marjoram, comes back with catnip and wormwood, because her nose is full of onion. Alcott trusts you to enjoy the dread.

The story also contains a second story. On the first snowbound evening, Eph reads from an old history book about Lady Matilda Bassett, a girl in the English Civil War who guarded her royalist father’s papers by refusing to leave the leather chair they were hidden in while soldiers searched the house. It is a neat formal mirror. The ancestor holds a secret under pressure; her namesake Tilly holds a household. The tale-within-a-tale is told half in Eph’s words and half in the book’s, and the children interrupt it constantly, which turns a dusty legend into a family argument about who would be bravest.

What works

• The kitchen detail is extraordinary. A spit set in tall andirons with a dripping pan below, a plum pudding boiled all day in its cloth, red-and-white china, two-pronged steel forks and a tablecloth woven from flax the girls watched grow.
• The children sound like children. Mrs. Bassett’s warning that “Thanksgivin’ dinners can’t be drove” sets the tone for a household that talks in country idiom, bickers and teases without ever tipping into sweetness.
• Tilly and Eph are a lively double act. He is cautious and dutiful, she is bossy and quick, and the story gives each a moment of nerve when a bear appears in the dooryard at dusk.
• It moves. Snowstorm, parlor invasion, cooking, the bear, a homecoming: there is no slack in it.

Where It Gives Ground

• The narrator keeps lecturing. Alcott repeatedly stops to tell modern children that they would find these toys tiresome, these dances laughable and these unschooled girls handier in a kitchen than any modern miss. Once is charming; four times is not.
• It is slight, and you know how it ends. Nothing in An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott will surprise an adult reader. The pleasure is entirely in the texture.
• The bear sequence plays children’s terror for laughs. The little ones are genuinely frightened, and the story finds that funnier than some readers will.
• Some details have dated badly. See the notes below; none dominate, but a parent reading aloud will want to know they are coming.

Do You Need to Know Little Women First?

No. The Bassetts are entirely separate from the Marches, and nothing in An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott depends on Alcott’s novels. Readers who know Little Women will notice the family resemblance, especially the bold elder sister and the gentle one beside her, and will enjoy seeing Alcott play the same chords without a parent in the room.

Read These Next

If An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott leaves you hungry for more family and holiday reading, start here.

1. So Far Gone by Jess Walter, for a modern novel that turns on a Thanksgiving dinner argument.
2. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, for another quick-tempered rural girl whose kitchen ambitions outrun her skill.
3. Beth Is Dead by Katie Bernet, a snowbound mystery that reimagines Little Women for teenagers.
4. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, for an earlier American harvest-season story with a frightening figure on the road.
5. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, if this is your first Alcott and you want the full family.

About Louisa May Alcott and Some Thanksgiving Trivia

Louisa May Alcott (1832 to 1888) grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, among Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, and worked and wrote from an early age to help support a family that rarely had money. Hospital Sketches, drawn from her work as a Civil War nurse, made her name in 1863, and Little Women made her fortune five years later. By the time she wrote An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott she was producing short pieces for magazines between longer books.

• First printed in St. Nicholas magazine, November 1881, as the opening story of that volume.
• Hallmark Channel adapted it, loosely, as a 2008 TV film with Jacqueline Bisset and Tatiana Maslany as Tilly; the premiere drew around 5.2 million viewers.
• Penguin included it in its 1995 Penguin 60s run of tiny paperbacks.
• The 2005 Bernardin picture book adds a recipe for apple slump, an old New England dessert of stewed fruit under dumplings.

Worth Your Shelf

An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott is not a major work. Its narrator’s sighing over the good old days has aged worse than its dialogue, and its plot holds no secrets from anyone over ten. But as a picture of a working household at its busiest, it is vivid, funny and generous to its young cooks, who are allowed to fail in public and laugh about it afterwards.

Read An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving by Louisa May Alcott on the night before the feast, while something is in the oven. Then check what is actually in the stuffing.