Hold on to your pie pans! You'll only need 517 of them...

It's November, so you know what that means! Time for bright, happy, shiny, sanitized versions of American history and the first Thanksgiving from 401 Party and Holiday Ideas from Alcoa (Conny Von Hagen, 1971). Did I mention shiny? This version is save-all-your-disposable-pie-pans-for-a-couple-years shiny.

See, I was serious. This project requires saving "aluminum pie pans galore!" And then cutting, rolling, taping, gluing, soldering, forging, milling, drilling, and quality control testing hundreds of pie pans to build a friendly pilgrim village and their native friends.

These enormous-headed people seem to be having their own stiff version of fun: the adults heartily shake hands; the kids all try to stare thoughtfully at the same space in the middle distance, imagining the names they might call each other if they could speak the same language; and the town hussy, all dressed up in red like she thinks the rest of the town doesn't notice, closes her eyes and imagines how much better her life could have been if she lived several hundred years in the future.

If you think that crafting this entire party isn't enough work for a month when you're actually supposed to cook a whole turkey with stuffing plus potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffed artichokes, cranberry salad, tossed salad, dinner rolls, fresh biscuits, a couple of cheese balls, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and apple pie (all from scratch, of course), then you're in luck! Just look in the background.

Those settlers need some trees to represent the bountiful forests of their new home!

Just make them from all the extra leftover pie pans and pubic hair painted green.

And the pilgrims had to get here somehow, right?

They all came here in an armor chest plate with weird epaulets! I mean, on a ship! Made out of pie plates!

Even the book acknowledges this might be missing the mark a little:

"It's a ship all right, even if she does not look like the Mayflower. But what do you expect of two pie plates?"

What do we expect, indeed? I expected some entertainment, and I got it. Alcoa has held up their end of the bargain once again.