I have to rate Thanksgiving as one of my four favorite eating holidays. The other three are Christmas, Fourth of July and Superbowl Sunday. What do you mean Superbowl Sunday isn’t a holiday? What an oversight. The following Monday should be a day off so we don’t send a bunch of people with hangovers,and in food comas out onto the highways. From what I have seen, most people take the day off after Superbowl Sunday to recover. The Government should formalize this and save a big chunk of this nation a sick day.
I have so much to be thankful for. I have a wonderful family that loves me, despite knowing me as well as they do. I live in a great community. I am living the dream of retirement, even though my body tends to protest when I try to do what I thought of doing when I was 35. My dream of becoming a professional bull rider in my golden years has been dashed. That happened when I had a couple of bicycle accidents and my body had a severe allergic reaction to slamming onto hard pavement.
Like most Americans, I will feast on a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy 3 football games. Wow. When I was a kid we had only one Thanksgiving game and it was always the Detroit Lions. The Lions were always a bad team. and were regularly defeated by whatever team drew the short straw and had to play on a holiday in the middle of the week. This year we have three different games that will run from morning to night and the Lions actually have a decent team and they should defeat the Packers this year (As a Bears fan, another thing to be thankful for).
There is one more thing to be thankful for. There’s going to be a Black Friday NFL game on the Prime Network. What a clever plan by Jeff Bezos and the folks at Amazon which run Prime. Keep people at home to watch the game and they will shop on their computers and phones instead of heading to the mall. What more could you ask for? My wife just told me she would like a ride to the mall at 5:00 a.m. Friday morning. I should get back in time for the game, right?
I always enjoy a traditional Thanksgiving meal of Turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, yams, vegetable, cranberries with some kind of pie for dessert topped with whip cream. To ensure I get the meal I like, I always volunteer to make it. This makes me altruistic (I am also thankful for a thesaurus) and also excuses me from clean-up duties so I can snooze through the second half of the mid-day game. Admit it, a nap is as traditional on Thanksgiving as a bowl full of fresh cranberry sauce from a tin can.
I have to admit, I can’t reheat all these pre-packaged dishes on my own. My wife, who is one of the finest cooks I know, insists on making a few dishes from scratch for our special celebration each year. For some reason she doesn’t care for stuffing from a box or pies purchased from the freezer section at our local supermarket. She goes all out. When she is done in the kitchen creating her masterpieces, it looks as if a bag of flour exploded, but the finished products are worth it. She makes her own pie crusts, and for me, that is one of my favorite parts of the pie. While I grew up on sage dressing, she makes her own cornbread stuffing that is to die for.
Another tradition we hear about that surrounds Thanksgiving is family drama. I have to admit that I have never experienced that, thank goodness. From what I hear from others, it is real and very uncomfortable. When you gather a large group from the same family in the same room, many long simmering disagreements will be unearthed. One way to combat possible verbal disputes, and who knows what else, is to pump your guests with plenty of turkey and the tryptophan that accompanies it. No, tryptophan is not a form of math, that’s trigonometry. It is also not a disease you get from undercooked pork, trichinosis, or triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen. It is an amino acid that comes from the freshly cooked turkey that causes those who consume it to become drowsy. That is why your Uncle Bill always asks if someone recorded the football game he just slept through so he can watch it later. If you have a group of sedated guests, it would be hard for any of them to start an argument, that is until they see the replay of that game they slept through.
The real bonus of having Thanksgiving is the bounty of leftovers for the coming weeks. When I was young, my mom would take that 30 pound turkey, we were a very large family, and turn that into a wide array of different meals following Thanksgiving. Turkey sandwiches would replace the usual bologna sandwiches we usually took to school for the following week. She would turn the leftover turkey into a bunch of imaginative entrees that would make the whole family say, “I’ve had enough.”
And that is why we have turkey, and family only once a year.
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