When we have turkey for a holiday meal we always have Grandma’s Oyster Dressing. We assume it was her mother’s recipe.

This tradition gets me laughing every Thanksgiving. How in the world, I wonder, did a family of Wyoming ranchers end up making oysters a key ingredient of our holidays? Was great grandpa Luce so rich he could have them shipped from San Francisco specially (as he did his brand)? And how would that even work back then?

Did the Luces from Maine bring the tradition to Utah with them in the 1840s? No way that could work. Spend weeks carting oysters in wagons across the plains? I don’t think so.

So I was pleased when this article ended up in one of my feeds:

• Matthew Wills. “How Oysters Became a Food Fad Way out West.” JSTOR. July 26, 2021.

Oysters were a thing in the West: “Across the map, nineteenth-century America was mad for oysters.” Who’d have guessed?

“One of the earliest mentions of oysters in the West dates to 1846 when venturers on the Santa Fe Trail were greeted with champagne and oysters upon arriving in Santa Fe.”

The author even satisfies my particular curiosity about oysters in Wyoming: “Cheyenne, Wyoming, established as a node of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1867, boomed from a few dozen people to six thousand in a couple of months. The town’s first newspaper, The Cheyenne Leader, was already advertising 75-cent cans of Baltimore oysters by October of that year.”

So, I’m done making fun of family tradition. (This one, anyway.) I’ve been defeated and forced to admit it is totally and absolutely plausible Grandma Essie made oyster dressing for holidays.

Land acknowledgments play a serious role in modern American and Canadian society, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with them. While people are chuckling they can also be opening to new and perhaps uncomfortable ideas.

None better than Walking Eagle News. I follow them on Twitter so I don’t miss the good stuff.

Today I’m sharing two of my favorites:

• Land acknowledgement malfunctions, causing land to be briefly returned to First Nations, Dec. 19, 2017
• Land acknowledgement spirals out of control, injuring dozens, Nov. 18, 2019

I won’t spoil the fun. Go read them yourself.

Disclaimer: I’m just a White Ex-Mo Settler Boy™ doing a bit to hear indigenous voices.

Coming down off the fun of celebrating Utah’s Pioneer Day #PieAndBeerDay #BiAndQueerDay #CincoDeMomo in a city that sees Mormons as strange and exotic. #SexCultCommunists

I went looking for Salt Lake City’s land acknowledgment. My question was whether it would be just the Shoshone, or whether it would include the Utes, Paiutes, and Goshutes.

Surprise (or not): Salt Lake City doesn’t seem to have a land acknowledgment. In fairness, maybe it takes too much time and energy just putting together the Pioneer Day parades and parties.

But, University of Utah has one: “We acknowledge that this land, which is named for the Ute Tribe, is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes. . . .” (Office of the President, “Indigenous Land Acknowledgment Statement“, University of Utah, website, retrieved July 26, 2021).

And Salt Lake Community College has one: “Salt Lake Community College is located on the Native American shared territory of the Goshute, Navajo, Paiute, Shoshone, and Ute People. . . .” (Heather Graham, “SLCC unveils land acknowledgement plaques“, The Globe, website, retrieved July 26, 2021).

So: we have a lavish annual celebration of our ancestors’ entrance to the Salt Lake Valley #MormonEntrada but only a meager acknowledgment of context. Ironic that this is the year of Deseret Nationalism #DezNat but not land acknowledgments.

• Mormon Land, “Why we might need to view Pioneer Day differently | Episode 191“, Salt Lake Tribune, podcast, July 22, 2021. “These settlers ended up displacing Native Americans and transporting slavery to region.“)

In Sweden they have lingonberries, a wild berry that’s harvested in the Fall and used to make jams, jellies, syrup, and preserves. Nowadays most Americans have heard of them because of IKEA, but when I was growing up it was something only Swedish-Americans knew about. It was a great treat when we’d find the finished products in specialty shops.

When our Swedish ancestors came to America, they didn’t find lingonberries. But here in the West they found chokecherries, and that became the new thing. Another wild berry harvested in the Fall and used to make jams, jellies, syrup, and preserves. All-American, not just Swedish. When I was growing up we used to drive up to the mountains, to pick chokecherries in our customary spots. I think every family had it’s own preferred, not quite secret, spot.

In my family the special treat was chokecherry syrup on pancakes. Even after I left home, I was assured a steady supply of chokecherry syrup from Mom, and later from Lawrence, my step-father. I wish I had thought to take a jar of it to Cousin Jonas when he was here a few years ago.

Now sister Laura tells me lingonberries really do grow in North America, just not in our region of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. And, the American cousin of the lingonberry is the cranberry, not the chokecherry. The news comes too late to change the I see it. For me, chokecherries will always be our special native berry as well as the American substitute for our ancestral lingonberries.

I’m intrigued by this article I found on BBC. “How did a bucolic dreamland became the perfect escape from real life? Anita Rao Kashi explores a whimsical world of nostalgia, tranquillity and folksy mysticism. A few weeks into lockdowns everywhere, a curious thing happened on Instagram feeds. More and more, they filled with images of pretty cottages adorned with climbers and flower-laden trellises . . . .”

“Much like Scandinavian concepts hygge and friluftsliv, the pastoral aesthetic of cottagecore is striking a chord.“

Nothing new here. We re-discover a romanticized nostalgia when life gets hard. Or, so it seems to me. When I was in college at Boulder in the mid-1970s, I was surrounded by a back-to-nature aesthetic. That’s the time in life I began wearing jeans and hiking boots. It wasn’t just the local zeitgeist; it was even stronger in Utah. There, the Mormon pioneer nostalgia is always a part of everyday life. Years later, I was still on the fringes of it. Missey and I looked at buying a property in Cedar Fort, where we wanted to build a cabin.

I’m not surprised to see nostalgia surging in this time of Trump’s virus but the fashion can be overstated. The kernel is an aesthetic of slowing down to live more deliberately. Here in Denver, we were locked down for 6 weeks. Life was deliberately slowed. I spent much of that time sorting and disposing books and bric-a-brac. I could look at that period and find signs of a nostalgia for rural life. However, that was only an erratic component. The stronger drive for me and for many others I know has been looking for a simpler life.

Mari Kondo more than Mother Earth News.

• Anita Rao Kashi. “‘Cottagecore’ and the rise of the modern rural fantasy.” BBC <bbc.com>. Dec. 8, 2020, retrieved Dec. 8, 2020.