You want to know something funny? I find myself missing the thanksgiving holiday ...
Oh not the actual being meaning of the holiday, because anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of history knows that none of the mythology that hovers around this holiday ever actually occurred, not to mention, the rape, pillaging, murdering and downright extermination of native American peoples before and after the first 'thanksgiving' ... hell, it's not even a specifically American holiday, having its roots in historical pagan European harvest festivals.
But I digress.
The thing I really enjoyed about this day was that, unlike Xmas, this holiday came with no expectations of presents (despite retail's best attempts to advertise 'thanksgiving gifts'), but rather was simply a time for family, friends, and/or loved ones to get together and eat, and be together, annoying the shite out of one another, and falling into food comas.
The epitome of this holiday for me was friends who complained one year about their mother actually making REAL cranberry relish from scratch ... they wanted the cranberry jelly that came out of can with a slurp and a plop, still in the shape of the can (I actually learnt how to make sure it does that btw, lol), because that was what they grew up, and thanksgiving is nothing if not all about tradition ... real or not.
It's not enough to bring a side ... no, there needs to be green-bean casserole with crunchy fried onion strings on top. There has to be dressing, and gravy, and mashed potatoes and sweet-potatoes, not to mention the required pumpkin-pie (which I never developed a taste for, I hate to admit) ala can-of-reddi-whip.
Not to mention, these strange jello-molds with multi-coloured marshmallows floating inside ... which for some bizarre reason that I couldn't figure out, counted as a vegetable. And if you had southern friends around, there would be some variety cooked greens, which virtually more pork/bacon content than green content.
These items are virtually non-negotiable I found in the tightly governed thanksgiving table ... tho there was becoming more and more accepted room for the 'tofurkey' apparently.
Living in the northern midwest as I did, the end of November naturally would have cooled off considerably (naturally with Chicago's blink-&-you-miss-it Fall season) in the weather ... so there's the crisp snap of the cold air, possibly fires in chimney (unless you lived in the city, where the only thing you'd notice was that people were sealing their apartment windows.
On thanksgiving day itself, you'd have a number of other traditions ... no matter how much prep you have done previously, there is the absolutely necessary "oh fuck I got the ... " statement, with the then resulting trip to the mental institution otherwise known throughout the year as the 'supermarket', wherein virtually the entire population of a particular area will have descended like ravenous locusts bent on stripping shelves clean of very particular and select items.
To get a sense of America's sense of itself, one only needs to see one's first stacked mountain of cranberry jelly cans in a supermarket. If anything symbolises America's self-focus, size, risky precariousness, and particularly devastating consequences, it would have to be that HUGE pile of cans.
Then, of course, there is the zipcode-sized turkey itself.
Seriously, when the bird you are eating is bigger than a basketball by a good margin, someone has been truly fucking with your poultry. But Americans will gladly, and with zeal, consume this steroid-ridden, hormone-pumped, never-occuring-in-nature, behemoth without a second thought.
Sausage-making and politics indeed.
Naturally, of course, the turkey comes with a sidekick ... tryptophan. For those not familiar with this little amino-acid, it is something that occurs naturally in most poultry, and virtually all invertebrates, but in the turkey it reaches levels that are truly epic in proportion, and has the most wonderful stuporous effect in humans when consumed.
How do I know this? Because my very first thanksgiving in America, some 8 years ago, I ate heartily of the bird, but being my foreign, turkey-novice self, had never built up the resistance to the thing that Americans have, given they have grown up with the stuff .... I barely made it to the couch before passing out in something that for me was the mother of all food-comas.
I got shit about that for a long time :)
But food-comas are themselves part of the milieu here ... one is expected to pass out and sleep for a while after consuming half your body-weight in food and things that vaguely resemble food (still don't want to think about that jello-mold shite). There will be groaning, and moaning, along with repeated exclamations that one should not have had so much (although, safely in the knowledge that come next year, or hell in a month's time, one will do precisely the same thing).
After said sleep, one will also go back and graze as one will, on the remains of the meal. Because there certainly will be remains, as another tradition of thanksgiving will naturally be turkey, gravy and dressing sandwiches for the next couple days. That there SHALL BE too much food for the number of people present to ever humanly consume is all a part of things.
However, I must not forget one important addition either; football.
Love football or hate football (I, personally, definitely developed a taste for the sport ... the spectacle was something simply beautiful), the Thanksgiving Day Match was something timed to occur after people had finished eating their way through their groaning table o-food. I'm not joking here. I loved the game ... and actually really looked forward to that moment one staggered away from the table, having removed as much grease as possible from one's fingers, collapsing to watch grown men pound on one another while packed in virtually indestructible armour.
Seriously, these guys have more protective-wear than the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm thinking the players get their food after the match ... one would hope so, at least, or there would be some seriously bad effects on the field, one would imagine, or else they really don't celebrate at all.
Which is ironic, given that thanksgiving is something that is supposed to be being enjoyed simultaneously be everyone in America ... so, naturally, non-white people are running around for the entertainment of white Americans, not realising the contradictory nature of such a supposedly egalitarian tradition. One only has to think of who the people running the supermarkets and food-shops on that day to see the similar phenomenon. Hell, if one watches the news and not the football that day, one will often only see the second-or-third-tier news-presenters on, those without the seniority to get the day off ... which, given the way in which inequality works in the US, will inevitably mean they, too, will generally be people-of-colour.
Of course, one doesn't think too much about such, as yet again, the news opens with a number of stories of explosions and fires caused by people deep-frying their turkeys without any actual experience nor real knowledge of how to do so properly.
If anyone is unfamiliar with the deep-fried turkey explosion, think of dropping a near-frozen naked bird virtually the size of a bean-bag into a furnace-hot deep-frier, generally filled too high with oil, with a naked flame underneath, and you can imagine the result ... seriously, search on youtube, there's an infinite supply of the eyebrowless perpetrators. In fact, it's almost like cluelessness is a part of the experience.
This will then be followed by images of people volunteering to feed people in homeless shelters (although the volunteers would never go near such virtually on any other day of the year), and troops lining up in their food-hall somewhere overseas to take their fill as well.
But, in all seriousness, thanksgiving, even for the most cynical and snide of us, is about being with the people one wants to be with (or, at least, the people one is expected to be with). It's the major tradition that all these other parts of the wider thanksgiving tradition orbit around ... because in addition to the exploding turkeys, the well-meaning shelter-volunteers, the troops munching through reheated frozen turkey slices, there will be the images on the TV of people in airports and the like, moving across the US in numbers virtually unseen at any other time of the year but Xmas (and probably more so than that, given the secular nature of thanksgiving).
They'll be going home, if they can, to be with those they will share this day with ... even if they have to go a thousand miles out of their way to do so.
Of course, naturally, this is a touch difficult for queer people, as often we don't have the best of relationships with our families, nor, given the 'family' centrality of the holiday, are we often allowed to be open about who we are, for fear of 'ruining' the holiday, or 'making it all about us'. And if you want to bring along your 'friend' ... well, there might not be enough food (despite the virtual mountains of such, and the fact that your straight-siblings' screws-of-the-week are naturally invited).
But we're willing to do this, for the day, because the tradition is loved so much. We know it's not real. We know it's about obscene over-consumption. About it's rude supermarkets, it's dodgy food, and representation of so many things that can be wrong in our society.
But it's still loved, and simply enjoyed for what it is.
And I miss that. Really.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
accomplished
hungry
busy
When I saw the previews for this week’s Big Bang Theory, I thought they were making a test tube turkey. Though the episode had some very funny moments, I thought it was a little less well focused than most. Sheldon getting helium voice during his NPR interview was hilarious.