Thanksgiving, I find, is one of those interesting Holidays soaked in lore, legend, and some excuse to bring the band back together, stuff their faces full of meats, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweat potatoes, pies, meat pies, and (not ironically) stuffing.  I’ve also found that it’s a typically American holiday seeing as how one of these legends involves some type of truce feast between the greedy arrogant white-man Pilgrim and red skinned godless heathen, American-Indian.  It’s a time to be thankful.  Thankful that your young one wasn’t stolen by pedophiles or raccoons or wolves or witches in the middle of the night.  Thankful that Uncle Jimmy’s drunken stupor didn’t set the barn full of Harvest aflame.  Thankful that after all of the moves and fear from where the paycheck was going to come from, there is finally some sort of financial peace of mind, even if it comes at the price of being overbooked and murderer of sleep.  I’m thankful for more than a few things, because the white-man knows, it could always be a worse rub. Someone pass the casserole.
I miss my friends and family.  For the last five years I’ve been hanging out on the West Coast, watching the cold fall waves crash hastily into the edge of California.  Occasionally there were immediate family members that would join us for a Thanksgiving feast, shun the ritual drinking of Wild Turkey 101, and make it feel like “home” for just a while.  My wonderful wife and I always cooked a veritable feats for our group of News-Gypsy Friends and Family.  2011 marks the year that we failed on that front.  We’ve let the duties slide to other families and friends that chose to host a gathering at their abode.  I feel out of place not having to wake up at 8am to start slow roasting a fowl and tend to it every half-hour.  It’s off kilter not cramming the house full of loved ones and stuffing high calorie globs of multi-colored carbohydrates down their gullet.  The ritual of the noon-time beer and grazing my way through the taste-testing process.  I think I’ll miss the weeks worth of left-overs the most.  I’ll also miss my wonderful little beach-town abode in Pacifica.  I’ll miss you all.
Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day,  is made for catching up on work and edits that I’ve pushed off for far too long (or haven’t been able to make time for as of yet).  I may turn on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, just for background noise and the inevitable Santa Clause drive-by because let us not forget what Thanksgiving is truly about… the official birth of colorful Christmas decor, sales, and commercial vomit.  Hell, Home Depot put up their Christmas display before Halloween.  That’s rolling deep in the spirit, if you ask me.  I don’t think that i’m fully prepared to take a shotgun to Thanksgiving before I’ve had my first left-over Turkey enchilada.  I suppose it’s just a natural marker… like pastels for Spring and gun shots for summer.
In any case, it comes and goes before you’re prepared to greet it and too stuck in the sweet-sadness of nostalgia to let it go.  The smells bring it all back home to a memory of youth… a time when the world was much more simple than this wi-fi age of mass confusion.  It kind of makes more sense when the elders would go off a little deep into the whiskey and bite someone’s head off at the table.  And with that, I’ll raise a glass to the sky and dive into some buttery concoction slathered with cheese… because Gluttony is the true American past time. Pass the bacon and the whiskey, it’s past noon by-Gawd.