Monday night I ironed the tablecloths, pressed the cloth napkins into turkeys and set the tables. When I finished I asked my husband to help me cover them with sheets to protect them from dust.

When my son came home from college he exclaimed, “Mom, you trashed the basement!”

I do not have a dining room, so I set tables up in two rooms in my basement. I set the food up, buffet style, in a third room. The fourth room is his bedroom. (He considers my basement his apartment.)

He thought I had piled a bunch of junk on the tables and covered them with sheets.

Yea, right…with Thanksgiving tomorrow?

My house is not as large as I would like, and I wish I had a dining room, but I have learned how to make it work. (We had 23 relatives at one time last Christmas in a 640 square foot basement!)

You may be looking around your house and wishing it was larger, more up-to-date, had new furniture, etc. I thought I would help you put it in perspective. Below is a description of three houses Abraham Lincoln lived in as a child.

Where He Was Born

“It was in a hunter’s hut on the edge of these lonely barrens, deep in the winter of 1809, that Abraham Lincoln came into the world. He was born on a Sunday morning – born on a bed of poles covered with corn husks. It was storming outside, and the February wind blew the snow through the cracks between the logs and drifted it across the bearskin that covered Nancy and her baby.”

Their First Cabin

“The first snow of winter was already falling when the family arrived; and Tom Lincoln hastily built what was then known as “a three-faced camp”. Today it would be called a shed. It had no floor, no door, no windows – nothing but three sides and a roof of poles and brush. The fourth side was entirely open to wind and snow and sleet and cold. Nowadays an up-to-date farmer in Indiana wouldn’t winter his cattle or hogs in such a crude shelter, but Tom Lincoln felt it was good enough for himself and his family all during the long winter of 1816-17, one of the severest and most violent winters in our history.

(They) slept there that winter like dogs, curled up on a heap of leaves and bearskins dumped on the dirt floor in a corner of the shed.”

The Second Cabin

A short time before Nancy’s death Tom Lincoln had built a new cabin. It had four sides, but no floor, no windows, no door. A dirty bearskin hung over the entrance, and the interior was dark and foul. No sunlight warmed and purified the cabin.”

“Lincoln the Unknown” by Dale Carnegie

Our houses look like a palace in comparison!

Happy Thanksgiving!