Thanks for the Giving
Thanksgiving has the distinction, along with Christmas and New Year, of being one of the few holidays that are still actually celebrated by Americans. The reason for this is clear. At Christmas, everyone you know is required by law to buy you stuff. New Year is the only time when getting drunk is not only considered socially acceptable, but is expected of you. Thanksgiving is the only day when watching football all day is "traditional," and women can't bug us about it.
Naturally, there is more to the celebration of Thanksgiving than that. There is food too. In fact, it is also traditional to stuff oneself until one is ready to explode. This is why Rolaids is the official sponsor of so many of those football games.
Some of you consider this to be a perversion of the true traditions. But think about it: The Pilgrims gathered at a huge feast to thank God for not letting them starve. Then they got together with the locals (whom they called "Indians," and we politically correct,twenty-first century people call "Redskins" only if we want to be sued by Native Americans) and played lacrosse, which is a heck of a lot more violent than football.
Americans are still imbued with thankfulness for not having starved yet, or at least our kids are. In many households cold cereal serves as breakfast and dinner for the kids whose parents really think they are "fixing their own meals." Lunch is either the school lunch, which is mostly World War II surplus C-rations served over warm lard, or a sandwich from home, normally peanut butter and jelly.
People are always talking about how nutritious these are, but the fact is the kids would be better off taking bites out of each other. And sometimes they do, although this sort of behavior is discouraged by most high schools. By then teens have their own money and can buy lunches with a higher food content, like Cheetos and Coke. These may lack something in the nutrition department, but no one knows for sure. For some reason Cheetos never seem to be evaluated in nutritional studies.
So when Thanksgiving rolls around, families gather together, hoping that one of their members still knows how to work that big oven thing in the kitchen. If all goes well, soon there is a large, cooked bird on the table and everyone watches hungrily as the adults attempt to carve it up.
The adults, who themselves have been subsisting on warm lard of various flavors as served by certain fast-food chains, are just as eager to grab hunks of meat off the carcass as the kids are. But they know that it would not be seemly to do this right away. Tradition dictates that the patriarch of the clan wield the carving knife until he has made a supreme mess of it. Then the family member familiar with kitchen tools steps in and rips pieces off as ceremoniously as possible.
After the festival of gluttony, everyone adjourns to the TV room for football. We New Englanders do this only half-heartedly. When the Pilgrims played against the Indians, they were painfully aware of the fact that they depended on the Indians' good will to survive. Thus they played to lose. This fine tradition was carried on by our New England sports teams for so long that we just can't believe they might actually win despite recent successes.
So as you and your family gather this Thanksgiving and stand around the kitchen in front of the oven wondering what all the little dials do, remember all the things you have to be thankful for. Be thankful for supermarkets which sell those turkeys to you pre-killed and plucked. Be thankful for cable television so you can watch decent teams like San Francisco and Miami. And even if you don't have cable, be thankful that. unlike the Pilgrims. you don't have to play lacrosse on a full stomach.
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