Merry Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is sort of forced holiday.  It celebrates a tiny group of ancient white people who fled their homeland seeking the religious freedom to wear strange hats and practice intolerance and bigotry.  Sort of like someone 300 years from now celebrating the arrival L. Ron Hubbard to Southern California.

These uninvited guests only survived due to the good graces of this continent’s previous inhabitants.   After which, the heavily buckled squatters repaid their saviors with gift-wrapped doses of small pox thus insuring their destiny always be manifest.

But I’m no Thanksgiving Scrooge.  I like turkey, football and even congealed globs of cranberry sauce with the can-rings still visible.  I just don’t let Thanksgiving facts get in the way of the Thanksgiving truth.

The truth is that Thanksgiving is about family.  Not some Norman Rockwell magazine cover Thanksgiving family, but a real family with whining and moaning and barely repressed rage over the way Aunt Dora “stole” all your mother-in-law’s jewelry when she went into the nursing home.   Oh, and guilt.  Can’t forget the congealed gobs of guilt (with the can-rings still visible).

Thanksgiving without family is like Christmas without batteries.   You can pretend the wireless remote meat thermometer works, but it’s not the same thing.

So, be thankful for everything you have because one day you won’t have it anymore and you’ll miss it.

Even Aunt Dora.