As we lumber toward the darkness of encroaching winter and fully embrace the glory of Seasonal Affective Disorder marked by the coincidence of falling leaves, falling temperature, and our falling spirits happening all at once, we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday the way we have as a nation for so long: playing up the make-believe peace and harmony and cooperation of Pilgrim and Native Americans and ignoring the fact that the relationship ended badly for one of them and it wasn’t the folks in the weird black hats who said stuff like “doth” and “prithee” a lot.
And even earlier than the Pilgrims landing and taking over came Europeans who decimated the population of Native Americans, who were
otherwise minding their own business, with disease, kidnapping, enslavement... in short, all the things we in America ascribe to our “heroes.” Columbus Day, anyone?
But Thanksgiving, which includes devouring turkey, has in this country a slew of what we like to call “traditions” but which should be called, in fact, “Things That Are Just Weird AF.”
Take for example, the tradition for decades of the President, the Leader of the Free World, “pardoning” a turkey the day before Thanksgiving, which in the prior administration had the unique occurrence of one turkey pardoning a much more intelligent, well-spoken, cute, and likable one.
I always thought “pardons” happened only with criminals, but are turkeys criminal? I suspect you’d say yes if you’d ever been harassed by a
Another weird tradition is turkey bowling with a frozen, presumably dead, or just wicked cold bird in an actual bowling alley, which began years ago in Newport Beach, California, where the town motto is “The Home of Really Bored Tanned Chill People With Not a Lot Else Going On.”
Also a thing for no good reason is “Turducken,” which is a most bizarre form of avian body horror. You take a deboned chicken and stuff it into a deboned duck which you then stuff into a deboned turkey and cook it, basically creating a roasted Frankenbird. This was so seriously wonderful to the late great football coach and commentator John Madden – he raved about it during broadcasts and once sawed through a turducken with his bare hand on live TV.
Running off your meal before you actually eat it happens in a tradition known as “The Turkey Trot,” which involves humans in turkey costumes, and not birds with digestive issues. People in said costumes usually do this for a good cause, which is raising money for charity and if they’re really smart, raising money for themselves by getting themselves and their ridiculous outfits on “Let’s Make a Deal.”
Making American great and fat again, since we are one of the most obese nations on the globe (which many of us are shaped like), is the tradition of turkey eating competitions held across the country. This is serious stuff, evidenced by guys like Joey Chestnut, a legit (albeit inexplicably competitive and not obese) eater, who in 2014 ate nine pounds of a 20-pound turkey in 10 minutes. This is not without precedent: in the days of the Pilgrims, Ebenezer “Big Britches” Snarkweather consumed an entire deer at the first Thanksgiving, not including antlers, upon completion of which he doth exploded.
And leave it to our wonderful neighbors to our north to really know what the holiday is about. Canada, which by the way has been celebrating Thanksgiving for decades years before we started it, celebrates a variety of things on the day, including explorer Martin Frobisher’s 16th-century attempts to discover the Northwest Passage, and emphasizing, you know, things to be thankful for, like the harvest, changing leaves, autumn flavor, and the like. Whereas in this country, we’re thankful for the domination of indigenous people that was unfortunate but hey, it led to other beautiful Thanksgiving traditions like getting up at the crack of stupid on Black Friday and standing in line in the cold at the local WalMart to play human hungry hungry hippo and gobble up savings for stuff they really don’t need but will kill to get.
Happy Thanksgiving, America! And if you’re not gonna eat that turkey leg, prithee, doth pass it to me.
