About Thanksgiving

Post 258:

            Happy Thanksgiving. I won’t jabber at length, but I had a few minutes. Could be that it’s just enough to say I appreciate a year of writing this blog and working on my books in earnest.

            But that’s boring. So I’ll travel down another lane.

            Last night I was thinking about Thanksgiving. I’ve always found it to be a really simple holiday, and thus, it has always been my favorite. Now it seems it’s just a hurdle that one must get over in order to start ramping up the fervor for Christmas and all the holy consumerism that that implies.

            The Thanksgiving story isn’t officially religious like the Christmas story, but it is sacrosanct in some ways. It begins the consecration of our history as a country, even though we weren’t a county. We’ve all heard the happy tale—the Native Americans and the Pilgrims rocking it out and breaking bread. I don’t know if it happened the way the stories say, in fact, it probably didn’t. But I bet those folks supped together at some point, and, you have to admit, just being alive back then was reason for celebration.

            Try to imagine the situation, sharing your lot with someone so unknown, doing it in goodwill. I tend to believe it went smoothly. There were so few settlers, so little reason for aggression or enmity. I’m no romantic, but the rumor got started somewhere, and I’ll pay heed to this particular rumor.

            So that’s what you do. Even though life is a pain in the ass and you just threw up nine-hundred times on the voyage over, maybe your goats are giving you trouble, the wife won’t stop giving you the business…it doesn’t matter. You sit said pained ass down, look across the table, forget your differences, and take a moment to fill the perilous air with sounds of good humor and mirth.

            Doing my five minutes of research into the holiday before I started writing, the trending story was about How Thanksgiving is a Horrible Lie or something in that vein. All too predictable. That’s a good idea. Take a nice story and crap all over it. Sorry, newsperson. You have the present and the rest of history at the ready to be defecated on. Leave us a frigging peaceful remnant in our minds and hearts, images of handshakes and grateful hearts.

            If I know one thing, there’s nothing like flaying defenseless animals to bring disparate people together. Cheers. Enjoy it out there.