I want to wish you and your families – both chosen and obliged – a wonderful Thanksgiving.  I hope you all enjoy this objectively mediocre* holiday that has become an odd, unnecessary political flashpoint.

*Hella Long Editor’s Note: Thanksgiving is a vastly inferior holiday to most of the other federal holidays.  If we were fighting over the cancellation of Christmas (like we do each year), I would understand the impassioned pleas for a stay-of-holiday execution.  After all, Christmas is the season of poorly chosen, age-inappropriate, mildly endearing gift giving.  In addition, it is also a day that celebrates the BIRTH OF CHRIST.  Thanksgiving arguably commemorates the death of a lot of people, turkeys, and civil familial dialogue.

As “evidence” of Thanksgiving’s inferiority, I have created a hand-drawn tournament graphic outlining most of the federal holidays in a March Madness-esque competitive bracket.  The power-protected seeding is determined by pairing the first federal holiday of the year (New Year’s Day) with the last federal holiday of the year (Christmas Day)…and so on and so on.  Let’s assume that the holidays are engaged in an elimination-style competition of either dressage or extremely violent cage fighting.  Your imagination, your choice:

You may be wondering why a left-leaning person like myself would choose Independence Day (the day of obnoxious American exceptionalism and excessive meat eating) over Labor Day (the day of worker’s rights and labor organizing) and Martin Luther King Day.  I have no eloquent answer other than my love of lighting fireworks in a public school parking lot located in a lawless unincorporated Texas county and drinking beer in a tube while floating down a river surrounded by drunken San Francisco tech workers.  None of this wonder transpires on Thanksgiving, the most overrated of American traditions.

 Let me elaborate further.  Thanksgiving is:

• a late November occasion and often subject to the “wintry mix” weather pattern – the ficklest and most indecisive of weather patterns.  Is it snow?  Is it rain?  Is it snain?  Whatever it is, it hasn’t quite decided its own queer identity and so we are left with its waffling implications: not enough snow to throw, yet too “snain” to prevent slip-n-slide ice.

• aside from the food, a holiday popularly symbolized by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  I have never encountered a parade that I actually liked and I fear that one day, when our civilization is excavated for future generations to analyze, the vestiges of our society will be represented by 50-foot Snoopy balloons and all the things that refused to decompose from the Pepperidge Farm float.

• on a personal note, memories associated with poor college student loneliness.  Specifically, Thanksgiving reminds me of my financial inability to fly home, resulting in my spending the day in a cafeteria eating turkey wedged between a kid from Senegal and a kid from Azerbaijan.

• a conduit for pumpkin spice.  As many know, I have waged a decades long campaign against pumpkin products, particularly “pumpkin spice”.  Pumpkin spice is a misnomer – there is nothing spicy about pumpkin.  Additionally, it is quite telling when the best use of pumpkin is to carve its flesh and let the carcass rot for the delight of children.

Finally (and warranting its own non-bulleted paragraph) is the food of Thanksgiving, which centers around the epitome of pedestrian fowl – turkey.  I have a lot ire towards turkey – ire best embodied by my favorite Thanksgiving story.  When my family arrived in the United States after fleeing from Vietnam, my mother was captivated by American traditions.  For our family’s first Thanksgiving, my mother spent the entire day preparing a giant turkey.  She was excited to serve it for family members that all survived a civil war, only to find safety and refuge in the United States.  However, at dinner, my jungle-ass uncles and aunties went straight for all the dark meat and tendons (drum sticks, thighs, etc.) and left the entire turkey breast – all 10 pounds of it – uneaten due to its dry, bland flavor.  It would remain uneaten for weeks.  From that day forward, my mother, bitter from her unappreciated labor and a disappointing American experience, vowed to never to cook turkey ever again.  What an American story, eh?

All jokes aside, despite the weird food, the weird politics, and the weird traditions, rest and gratefulness are so important this hectic year.  So on that note, happy holidays, y’all.  You deserve it. 

Also, please enjoy this TikTok.

[Fin Editor’s Note.]