Pennsylvania Snow

Pennsylvania gets a lot of snow, but I've heard that the most memorable snow was the "big snowstorm" of Thanksgiving, '47. As I remember the story, one day it was a beautiful, sunny, crisp autumn and the next day the earth was covered in three feet of snow. It was Thanksgiving, and the roadside cabins my parents rented to travelers were empty. Service stations (including their tiny service station) and county offices were closed, so the highways remained impassible. Early that morning, my mother was surprised to see four young men trudging through the snowdrifts, headed for her front door. They were tourists from Italy on an American cross-country adventure, and they had spent the night huddled in their car. My mother invited them in to get warm and have some coffee and breakfast. With heavily accented and broken English they explained that they had been traveling west when they were caught off guard by the sudden snowstorm. They had been searching for a place to spend the night and wait out the storm when their car skidded off the road in the dark. My mother opened two cabins, dressed the beds in fresh linens, and lit the pot-bellied wood stoves. Then she invited the Italians to come up to the house for meals, until the plow came by and the tow-truck could pull their car out of the snowdrift. My mother remembers this as her favorite Thanksgiving, she and my father and their two small daughters sharing our American traditions with the Italians. The Italians exclaimed over the turkey, the dressing, the pies...she graciously accepted their praise. But, there was one dish they wouldn't touch, no matter how much she coaxed. The jellied cranberry sauce, pushed out of a can and sliced onto a plate, caused them to react with fear and disgust. Later in the day my father was able to discern that they had believed the dish to be slices of congealed blood. Of course, my dad thought this was hilarious, and we heard the story repeated every Thanksgiving.
The next day the snowplows came by, and afterward the tow-truck came to pull the Italians' car out of the snow and out to the State Highway. The Italians waved good-bye to my mother and her little family, leaving Thanksgiving memories and a seedling of family lore.