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Merry Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving today. Thanksgiving was historically a day of giving thanks for the harvest. Today it’s stereotypically (but quite correctly) depicted as a day for eating turkey, bickering with relatives, and watching football.

What happened? Well, we sort of don’t grow our own crops anymore. I can see Thanksgiving having a significance to some farming family outside Zuquardic, Nebraska. They raise their own grain and vegetables, I guess. And they grow their turkey themselves. Father, in his overalls and farmer’s hat, slaughters the turkey in the barn, and mother cooks it and everything else all nice and old-timey. Mashed potatoes ‘n’ gravy, green beans, corn on the cob, yams, cranberry sauce, whatever. And the farmer’s hot daughter churns the butter. Yeah. They have a feast tonight, and then tomorrow morning they start working again.

But for the rest of us, we can’t help but trivialize the holiday. Like every other holiday in Western culture (except maybe Passover), we seem to have lost touch with its origins. Last year, a classmate of mine who didn’t spend much of her childhood in America decried Thanksgiving as a celebration of gluttony. I didn’t believe her, but now I realize that she’s right. Today Thanksgiving really is all about the meal. Everyone who calls Thanksgiving “Turkey Day” knows this, subconsciously or otherwise.

Furthermore, Thanksgiving has traditionally been regarded as the gateway to Christmas. Franklin Roosevelt knew this when he changed Thanksgiving from the last Thursday to the second-to-last Thursday in November (rationale: longer Christmas season = stores make more money = no more Great Depression). He and Congress hammered out a compromise: it’s now the fourth Thursday in November, which is sometimes the last and sometimes not. But now stores are going back even farther than Thanksgiving, no matter what the date. I started seeing Christmas decorations and stuff a couple weeks ago. It makes me want to puke.

I’m going to put the “Thanks” and “giving” back in Thanksgiving by giving thanks for things I’m thankful for. The other day I scribbled down a little list:

• Friends and family… duh!
• My willpower & desire to always improve myself.
• Good teachers, especially Dear Mrs. Vazquez [who, as I failed to mention, actually moved to Puerto Rico].
• Reinhard Engels for the No S Diet & shovelglove
• The people I’ve communicated with in Esperanto
• My chiropractor

I added that last one because the day before, I had been a little overzealous with the shovelglove. But I’m thankful for her anyway. I haven’t missed a day of school in about three years because she keeps me healthy.

Today, some relatives will be coming for Thanksgiving dinner at our house, as usual. I like it best that way because if it were anyone else’s house, it just wouldn’t be the same. Part of the reason is that we have a large dining room table, so there’s a lot of room for everything and everyone. The table’s here in the room with the computer (or vice versa). It’s already set for dinner (which will probably be in the late afternoon/early evening). My mom started setting it last night.

Are you going to fry your turkey? UL (as in “UL Listed”) has a video saying that you might want to be careful. (You know the video’s going to be great when you see a firefighter carefully placing the turkey in the fryer.)

And today Snopes (once again) tackles the question: Does eating turkey make you sleepy? Their answer, in a nutshell:

It’s not the turkey that makes you tired, it’s all the food. Who’d have thought?