You know, there’s more to Thanksgiving than gravy stains and grease fires. For instance: it’s the official kick-off of eggnog season.
This time of year also spells socially acceptable public belt unbuckling, really uncomfortable political discussions with people you thought you loved and an opportunity for family and friends to come together in the spirit of sitting around a living room staring at their own personal screens.
No wonder Thanksgiving rates as our second favorite holiday after Christmas. Let’s face it: Nothing can compete with American Christmas (I should know; I’ve been watching Hanukkah get its butt kicked for 40 years).
As such, Thanksgiving weekend is one of the busiest times of year for retailers. The day after Thanksgiving has long been known as Black Friday. Now, it’s followed by Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday and When-the-Eff-Do-I-Get-my-Own-Day? Wednesday.
Of course, Thanksgiving traces its roots to Protestant Reformation-era England, the ancient Hebrew harvest festival of “Sukkot” and an annual Dutch observance commemorating the end of the 1574 Siege of Leiden. So you can see it’s thoroughly American.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, held what we consider the “First Thanksgiving” in 1621, marking their successful completion of a full year after migrating to the “New World.” Note: the citizens of America at that time — by whom I mean Native Americans — joined these immigrants in their three-day feast, you know, as opposed to condemning them all as terrorists, criminals and job-stealers, and threatening mass deportation. Just saying.
Today, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November; Canada celebrates it on the second Monday of October. I’m guessing that’s because they use a metric calendar?
This year, Thanksgiving fell on Nov. 24, which also happened to be the celebrity birthdays of Toulouse-Lautrec, Scott Joplin, original Beatles drummer Pete Best and Donald “Duck” Dunn, the bass player from, among others, Booker T and the MG’s and the “Blues Brothers” band (you know, the guy with the perm and the pipe?), all of whom I’m thankful for.
Despite its religious origins, Thanksgiving has since grown into a secular federal holiday along the lines of New Year’s, the Fourth of July or Super Bowl Sunday.
The main event, so to speak, is a large festive meal generally centered on a turkey — what U.S. holiday would be complete without a steaming hunk of meat?
Other Thanksgiving traditions include watching football, wishing there was something else on TV besides football (and I don’t mean CNN), drinking enough beer to make hanging out with your septuagenarian parents bearable, waiting in airports, sitting in traffic, freebasing Pepsid AC and explaining to your kids that grandma and grandpa weren’t nearly as forthcoming with the candy and money when you were their age.
This brings me to my favorite Thanksgiving custom: going around the table and expressing gratitude. Since I probably wasn’t at your Thanksgiving dinner — although I did just get a drone, so you never know, I could’ve captured the whole thing on surveillance video — I’ll close with my own brief list.
This year, I am thankful for: reflective outerwear; breathable underwear; 50-50 bleach-water solution; pea gravel; big blue tarps; Mae Ploy Thai sweet chili sauce; Visqueen; automatic hard drive back-ups; “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” still the greatest Thanksgiving movie of all time; RainX; rock salt; the near-constant airing of “Star Wars: the Force Awakens” on late-night premium cable, thereby enabling me to finally see it, albeit in 20 individual non-sequential chunks; snow, of any accumulation; WD-40, duct tape and, while we’re at it, Krazy Glue; pre-mature male pattern baldness, which, despite being a total bummer during my 20s, now spares me the rapid greying that suddenly seems to afflict all of my contemporaries; hoodies; Netflix, which, at $8.99 a month remains the cheapest babysitter around (not to mention the only one you can call at 6:30 a.m. Sunday; bungee cords; conscientious pedestrians; conscientious motorists; vitamin D, however I can get it; Brussels sprouts, for providing an alternative to kale; well-marked address numbers; carabiner clips; French drains; French Vanilla Coffeemate; my newfound habit of neatly re-coiling extension cords, hoses and ratchet straps after every use; and the failure of skinny jeans to replace Carhartts in Southeast Alaska … at least so far.
Most of all, in 2016 I am thankful for humor, which, along with my redoubled commitment to setting a positive example for my kids, is not only how I’ve managed to make it through the last two and a half weeks — it’s how I intend to survive the next four years.
Happy Thanksgiving, Juneau. May all your kitchen surfaces be free of salmonella.
• Geoff Kirsch is a Juneau-based writer and humorist.
