Holiday Tradition

The other day at our Creative Writing meeting I was reading my selection when everyone interrupted me asking if it was true, was I making it up. I told them it was true and I was not making it up. No one had heard of this before. I thought maybe it was a regional thing restricted to a few sections of Queens and Brooklyn.

Now, I'm asking you if any of you have heard of this, or done this. Maybe the custom moved past NY.

When I was a child, every Thanksgiving morning I and all the children on my block would dress in our oldest, worn-out clothes and dirty our faces. We would then visit our neighbors and ask if they had anything for Thanksgiving. They would give us pennies, fruit or nuts. This was a common practice in my neighborhood until the 50s.

Did any of you do this? I know I'm not making this up because some of my school friends remember doing this. I find it hard to believe that only a few small sections of the City had raggamuffins, as my mother called us.