THE THANKSGIVING INCLINATION

It's Thanksgiving again. Today is my favorite holiday but once again it doesn't feel like Thanksgiving. I don't know what it is, maybe it is the fact that America doesn't feel like America anymore so I can no longer get into the happy-go-lucky mood I once did when I was six and my mother was slaving over the stove for three days. I remember the smells permeating through our house, the relatives showing up, everyone drinking and smoking at the kitchen table, eating ourselves into comatose. Then for the long weekend everyone slept anywhere they could find a soft place to lie down and we'd eat leftovers and tell stories and watch old great movies from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Those days are long gone now and a lot of the people who used to participate in those wonderful days are either gone or we have moved on, relocated to strange parts of the country or other countries for that matter in search of your own utopia, but as the times have changed in society, so have the traditional holidays. Nobody stays in the same place anymore. I didn't, I traveled out on the open road to see what was out there. But there are times when I want to uproot and return to the place of my birth. But then if I do what if it isn't the way I remember? So you have to weigh the pros and cons of doing impulsive things like changing your entire life. I woke up as usual at 4:30 this morning, put on a pot of coffee and went downstairs to my computer and got to work. Every morning, week days, weekends, holidays, doesn't matter, every day is a work day. But that isn't the reason why Thanksgiving doesn't feel like Thanksgiving. The White House in the District of Columbia no longer carries and magic and tradition for me anymore and society in general doesn't remind me of the society of good hardworking people I knew as a child. It's a wrecked image. I wouldn't be surprised if Turkey is no longer going to be considered the Traditional dish for Thanksgiving and instead it will be Ugali in the new America.

Thanksgiving was supposed to be December 4 when the settlers arrived in 1619 and declared that day a day of Thanksgiving because they survived the wretched crossing of the ocean and landed in a freezing land with no food, so the locales decide to help them because they are nice and they provide them all kinds of great food.  Well two years later they grow an abundance of food and hold another Thanksgiving day in 1621. Then in 1622 those same Indians that helped them survive in 1619 are butchered by the settlers. The continental congress declared December 18th a day of Thanksgiving in 1777 but there was probably a recession and people weren't interested in giving thanks for anything and still cursed the lefty King of England for trying to tax them like a mad community activist. Thanksgiving was pretty much forgotten until Abraham Lincoln declared November 26 a national holiday. People viewed Thanksgiving back then in terms of feeling truly grateful to God for being provided a means to survive. Today in America Thanksgiving is receiving government wicks to purchase marijuana and cheese doodles. If you want a feel good image of what Thanksgiving once was for us from the old world Google Home To Thanksgiving a lithograph published by Currier and Ives in the 19th century. Ah...the nostalgia.

But sure when the Turkey and the rest of the dishes are properly cooked, immediate family visiting, I can go back to those wonderful years, even if it is, say late July, it is the atmosphere that we remember most isn't it. For those preparing the food they are pulling their hair out, cursing under their breath, thinking to themselves, "This is the last darn year of this nonsense! Next year it is Shoney's!" But for the little ones and those visiting it is a wonderful celebration. It is a time when we can eat ourselves sick and not feel guilty about it. It is a time when we can look back on past times without feeling regretful, or sad. They are happy, fun times and for those who keep to the great traditions of our religious past and ignore the curse of today's "higher ups, community activists and feminists" who want nothing more than to eliminate all traditions so the people will be stripped of their cultures and identities. So in defiance I will begin in a matter of minutes a Turkey dinner with all the dressings for my little one so she will have those wonderful memories of the smells and the laughs and she will be able to tell her children someday when names are no longer printed on birth certificates and only numbers, of what the world was once like.

Maybe some of you cynics out there will say that you don't celebrate Thanksgiving anymore because you know how much butter and lard was smeared over the Turkey while it was cooking and then the rest of the dishes are more butter and lard than starch and you stand before the table and stare at the dishes steaming before you and you can already feel yourself getting fatter, your arteries becoming more and more clogged by thick sticky plaque and cholesterol. You stand there and have fleeting images of your headstone in the local cemetery with the inscription, One too many Thanksgivings! But if you are one of those who won't eat a great Thanksgiving meal because you are worried about your glutes and flappy underarms than you are the rotten stink bags that are helping to destroy all the wonderful traditions that we once had and the ones we were once allowed to celebrate in our schools growing up. Nowadays  kids aren't allowed to celebrate anything except for Hitler's birthday.  One part of the problem is that people throughout history had it tough. Forever people have had to work their fingers to the bone for anything that they wanted but nowadays with test tube grown everything, processed everything, government given everything nobody has to work hard anymore so they no longer appreciate anything because everything is so easy to get and it costs them nothing to get it. They sit there in front of their 77 inch flat screen T.V. with an HDVR watching Jerry Springer sucking own T.V. dinners purchased with food stamps delivered to their couch and they curse the holidays because their government aid isn't begin delivered on those days.

Happy Thanksgiving every one, go out and give your children something to remember, something positive and heartwarming. Teach them that the only way to have a truly great Thanksgiving is not to accept the government T.V. dinner and get out and work your rear end off to provide their family with their own Thanksgiving dinner. Then put in that time and prepare a wonderful meal with sweat, curses and frustration. And if the Turkey is as dry as a piece of Arizona flat rock at least you made the effort which is more than I can say about 88% of the population. In God we Trust and give thanks for our station in life and the hope that we can improve that station through patience and hard work and a strong faith.