Thanksgiving is a quintessential New England Holiday. It all started here with the Pilgrims landing on Cape Cod. Sure, the first real Thanksgiving was celebrated in Plymouth but you can be positive those very pilgrims were grateful for landing on Cape Cod at all. We at Seal Rock are no exception to the Thanksgiving rule. We not only celebrate in true New England style, we like to store a little color of the season long before the turkey goes in the oven.
Starting with home decor, it’s nice to bring some of the native plants home, capturing a bit of the color of New England Fall. We like to start with large armfuls of the very prolific Bittersweet. It wraps its vines up and down trees, fences, over ledges, just about everywhere. It can be gathered in long enough lengths to wind into a lovely door wreath or spray. The glossy red berries are temptingly revealed once the bright yellow shell cracks open and peels back.
It just wouldn’t be harvest time without a big orange pumpkin sitting squat on the front porch as a welcome to the beginning of the season. Most Cape Cod homes combine colorful chrysanthemums and maybe a corn stalk or two. Our favorite are the mini pumpkins peeking out from unexpected places and one fat gourd guarding our front step. This goes directly to the woodland creatures that eventually find a way to get inside and steal the seeds. Nature’s bounty.
Next it would be nice to have some blush pink jelly from the rose hips that line our seawall. Once full of shocking pink fragrant blooms, the now weathered roses provide fat orange hips ripe for picking. They add to the Autumnal festival of the outdoors because they stay well into winter when snow will cover them like fuzzy mittens. We love to buy our rose hip jelly at Crow Farm in Sandwich Village. They have a large assortment of native jams and jellies, locally made, and displayed on shelves along with pies, apples, cranberries, and honey.
Our bouquet is getting full but wouldn’t be complete without our own multi colored hydrangeas. If left to dry on the lush bushes, they turn the color of ripe plums. The long stems can be picked, tied in bundles, mixed with the lively colors of a left over sunflower or even red dog wood stems for an indoor display. It’s all part of capturing the Fall Colors that New England and Cape Cod are so famous for.
