I had the opportunity this week to bake several loaves of pumpkin gingerbread with my daughter as Thanksgiving gifts for friends and family. On a cold, damp weekday off from school, we created snow squalls of flour and drifts of salt and powder. We wore our work well as we scooped and measured and leveled the dry stuff and poured it into the creamy wet stuff. We enjoyed the hail storm as bits of dough like hail stones circled the room and stuck to a little bit of everything.

This could have been the dough for anything autumnal--allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, and, of course, ginger flavored the batter with the essence of fall--until we added that wonderful orange slime called pure pumpkin. We managed to do this without creating an orange blizzard around the room. For hours--it felt like hours--we waited for the loaves to bake. I washed dishes while my daughter kept her vigil and read by the warm stove. I stood back when my daughter delivered her foil-wrapped packages of bread, which were really thank-you notes to special friends and family. She handed them over with quiet satisfaction. Her grandparents complimented her work, and her cousin demonstrated his approval by inhaling two slices before her very eyes.

Her choir teacher asked if it would keep from Sunday to Thursday because she wanted to share it with her entire family who would be home for the big day. It was a simple question that told my daughter her adventure in the culinary arts would find a place on someone else's Thanksgiving board.

The Thanksgiving story is about survival with and for each other. It's the story of people who took what little they had and invested their hearts and souls into making it something new and better and satisfying. It is about making tremendous leaps of faith in each other for each other. It is the faith that transforms a pile of white powder into bread. And it's a lot of fun.

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