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By Dean Norman

When I was drawing funny greeting cards for Hallmark and American Greetings, I had a lot of fun making Thanksgiving cards by drawing funny pilgrims, turkeys, Indians and the traditional Thanksgiving football games. The first Thanksgiving football game was the Pilgrims vs. the Turkeys. It was suspended when the pilgrims ate the turkeys’ quarterback.

Anyway, my fondest memories of November are not family Thanksgiving dinners. It is smoking corn silk. In October we would harvest brown corn silk from a field where the farmer made shocks of cornstalks that looked like Indian teepee tents. You can see drawings of them on Thanksgiving cards, but farmers don’t make corn stalk teepees anymore. We found out that the corn silk was too moist to smoke in October. So we put it in brown paper bags, and hid it from our parents.

“Yes, corn silk may not be as harmful as tobacco, but it will lead you to smoking tobacco when you are older. So DON’T smoke corn silk.” That was our parents’ opinion, and no amount of arguing could change their minds.

When all the leaves were off of the trees in November, the corn silk was ready to smoke. We built a lean-to in the woods from sticks just like the Boy Scout manual showed. Then after dinner we went to our lean-to to smoke corn silk. Sometimes it was raining, and that made it better. The lean-to kept us dry, and we learned how to make a fire and keep it going in the rain. We could dry wet sticks beside the fire if the sticks were not over one inch in diameter. Then, we'd add a few sticks from time to time.

We rolled our corn silk in newspaper or brown bag paper and lit it from a burning stick from the fire. It was tricky to keep our cigarettes burning. Actually, they were fat cigars. We had to keep pulling on them to keep them burning. Sometimes they burst into flames and we had to blow out the flame. We NEVER inhaled the smoke like cigarette smokers do. Corn silk smoke was vile. We just pulled a little smoke in and then puffed it out.

We smoked corn silk cigars in the rain while lying on the ground under a lean-to, and kept a little fire going while talking about….about everything. We were pre-teen philosophers. When we returned home at bedtime, we said the smell of smoke on our clothes was from a campfire.

When I went to college, I started smoking a pipe, and never wanted to smoke cigarettes. I thought pipe tobacco wasn’t harmful because I didn’t inhale it. Just pulled a little smoke in and puffed it out. Like smoking a corn silk cigar.

The first snow in December ended the corn silk smoking seminars in the lean-to. We started thinking about sledding and Christmas. So I think we were right. Corn silk smoking didn’t harm us because we only smoked it for a few weeks in November.

I tried it again when I was an adult, and wondered why I thought it was so good when I was a kid. Corn silk smoke is vile.

— Dean Norman

Dean Norman is a cartoonist and humor writer, whose work has appeared in greeting cards, The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, The Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine and The Kansas City Star. He's also written comedy for cartoon shows and written and illustrated children's books. He illustrated a cartoon book for Cleveland Metroparks, Cleveland Metroparks Adventures.