The Thanksgiving Treasure Read Online Free PDF Page A

lot more money. We still were pals though, because Clear River was such a small town that you had to be more or less friends with everyone, otherwise there weren’t enough people to go around. But I definitely considered Tanya my worst friend in the sixth grade.
    We worked on our drawing for a while, then Miss Thompson called us all back to our seats for English period. In history period we had been studying the first Thanksgiving, and we had all been assigned to write essays on what we thought the Pilgrims had meant Thanksgiving to symbolize.
    Miss Thompson called on Tanya first. “It symbolizes giving thanks,” Tanya answered.
    Everybody snickered at that, and Miss Thompson smiled.
    â€œWell, yes, Tanya, but that’s fairly obvious. Can anyone else take it further?”
    â€œThey were thankful for their bountiful harvest,” I answered.
    â€œYes, Addie. And what else? Billy?”
    â€œThey were thankful because they made friends with the Indians.”
    â€œYes,” said Miss Thompson. “They had made friends with some of the Indians. And can anyone tell me how the first Thanksgiving itself contributed to the friendship between the Pilgrims and the Indians?”
    â€œThe Pilgrims invited the Indians to dinner,” Carla Mae answered. “And the Indians were glad to have a lot to eat.”
    â€œYes,” said Miss Thompson. “The Pilgrims did invite the Indians, but let’s not forget that the Indians taught the Pilgrims how to raise a lot of their crops and trap the game, or the Pilgrims would have gone hungry. What did they hope to accomplish, then, by inviting the Indians to dinner?”
    â€œThey wanted to be better friends with them,” said Billy.
    â€œRight,” said Miss Thompson. “They wanted to strengthen their friendship, and they invited some of the Indians who were their enemies so they would become friends and share each other’s food and culture. So you see, Thanksgiving also symbolizes friendship.”
    â€œYou mean we should invite our enemies to Thanksgiving dinner?” I asked.
    Miss Thompson smiled. “Why, yes, I suppose that might be a good way of building a friendship with them.”
    The class went on with the discussion, but I never heard the rest of it. I was still thinking about what Miss Thompson had said … inviting enemies to dinner. I had a terrific idea.

Chapter Five
    That night at dinner, I was careful to keep my elbows off the table and pass the butter before I was asked. I even sat up straight in my chair instead of slouching and squirming, which my dad probably thought was a miracle, but he did not comment on it.
    This was all calculated to put him in a good mood after dinner, at which time I would approach him with my latest brilliant idea. I came up with a brilliant idea every now and then. They seldom impressed my father.
    My most recent brainstorm had been to string a pulley clothesline between Carla Mae’s house and ours so we could send messages back and forth on it. We didn’t have a telephone in the house because Grandma said it was just a newfangled gadget and that if it rang, she would just have to answer it. I. tried to explain that answering it was the whole idea, but got nowhere. Besides, Dad never spent any money that wasn’t absolutely necessary. He figured that if somebody wanted to tell us something, they could darn well come right out and do it face to face, or write a letter where you could see it all set down in words. So we didn’t have a telephone, or a pulley clothesline, to any of our frequently called upon neighbors.
    This resulted in a lot of tramping back and forth by Carla Mae and me until we had worn an ugly path across the lawn between our two houses. We were told to use the sidewalk, but we never did. Carla Mae’s mother and my grandmother, both being avid gardeners, decided they would thwart this path-making by planting a row of hedges between the two