Thanksgiving : A Gift of Holiday Recollections : As Years Pass, Focus Centers on Family

They had survived their first raw winter in the new land--a harrowing time of scarce food, hard work and sickness that killed nearly half of the tiny band of 102 Pilgrims who had settled in Plymouth, Mass.

And so they gathered in the autumn of 1621, having been befriended by their Indian neighbors and blessed by a bountiful harvest, to rejoice and give thanks, as was their custom, with a harvest festival.

Three-hundred sixty-four years later, the spirit of that first New England Thanksgiving lives on.

It’s a theme with few variations: An annual reunion of family and friends, a festive occasion permeated with the tastes and smells of good things to eat.

But, as years go by, it is the memories of past Thanksgivings and the people we shared them with that help give special meaning to the annual rite of fall.

To find out what significance the national holiday has played in their lives, prominent Orange County residents were asked to share their thoughts on Thanksgivings past and present.

“Each Thanksgiving is special in its own way,” Newport Beach philanthropist Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke said. However, Mrs. Clarke, an octogenarian, said her most memorable Thanksgivings were those she spent in the early ‘30s at the Irvine Ranch, and those celebrated four decades later in the horse country of Virginia.

“They were very different, but what they shared in common was that they were family-centered,” said Mrs. Clarke, who bears the names of three old California families. She is the widow of James Irvine Jr., whose family was once Orange County’s largest landowner, and Thurmond Clarke, chief federal judge for the central district of California in Los Angeles.

“When I lived at the ranch (from 1929 to 1933), 10 to 12 family members would get together,” Mrs. Clarke said, recalling the intimate way in which the holiday was observed in the rustic setting of the Irvine Ranch. “It was a long time ago, but I still remember the huge turkey and the big flower arrangements.

“We’d walk around the ranch, looking at the walnut groves and then down Irvine Boulevard because it had the most beautiful holly trees.”

Far different were the Thanksgivings she spent throughout the ‘70s at her daughter Joan Irvine Smith’s horse farm in Middleburg, Va.

“It was the middle of the (fox) hunt season,” Mrs. Clarke said. “Mr. (Morton) Smith (then her son-in-law) was master of the hounds, and he was resplendent in his pink coat. I’m not a horsewoman, but I did get to follow the hunt by going ‘hilltopping.’

“A few of us would get in a car and follow the hunt along hilltops as it proceeded from farm to farm. Those horses would be going about 30 m.p.h. We had such fun trying to keep up.”

A native Californian, Mrs. Clarke said she was struck during her Virginia Thanksgivings by the efforts that Easterners put into making Thanksgiving a bigger celebration than it seems to be in the West.

“Snow sometimes was on the ground, just like a picture post card,” she recalled. “There were these great, beautiful trees, and everything was so colorful. I was from California; I just wasn’t used to seeing things like this.

“The table on Thanksgiving was so beautiful. My daughter went to great pains to make sure the table had just the right appointments and that the rest of the house was beautifully decorated. Mr. Smith kept the fireplaces blazing in the library and the living and dining rooms.

“My daughter’s children were home from boarding school. That made it very festive, and everybody was very happy.

“On Thanksgiving Day the turkey was served with great flair by a large staff. Every time, the 10 to 20 guests were simply overwhelmed. It was truly an old Virginia Thanksgiving.”