Another Thanksgiving has come and gone and, this morning, as I sat down with a breakfast of turkey omelet, I began to think back over the things I have to be thankful for. It was a sobering collection of brain spasms.
The original pilgrims had such fare as swan, lobster, and seal on their menu, among the various agricultural wealth at hand. They celebrated the bounty of their harvest with the Wampanoag Indians, who added venison to the list of choices. Life wasn’t always so bountiful then, but there was still much to be thankful for. Throughout the last 385 years, we have continued to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, though the menu has changed somewhat.
Thanksgiving is a tradition, meaning we always do the same thing over and over again; we spend hours in a hot, humid kitchen, as though our lives served no purpose other than to generate a week’s worth of turkey-related leftovers. Sometimes we throw a changeup into the mix and make pork-related leftovers, but the end result is the same; an endless parade of soups, casseroles, sandwiches, and the occasional bowl of turkey chili.
The leftover problem has escalated since 1621, with the advent of modern refrigeration and the abundance of other sources of food than the family kitchen. This doesn’t mean that we won’t have a close encounter with a developing lifeform when we clean out the refrigerator in the spring, it just means that we have a longer time to eat the same meal in various forms before it goes all blue-green and fuzzy. Even so, we still take chances as we move into the second and third week of reruns. There are so many uncertainties. Should you worry about mushrooms going bad? They used to grow on things that had already gone bad. I don’t care if the Romans called them ‘the food of the gods’, that’s just disturbing.
Personally, I would love to know who the first person was to look at a mushroom and say, “I think I want to try eating that funny-shaped thing growing out of that rotting log/corpse!” There has to be a first time for everything, I suppose, but how desperate do you have to be? I would have liked to see the face of the first person to bite into an onion, though.
This is a country in which thirty percent of the population looks like they ate the remaining seventy percent. I can only guess that to be the reason that many fast food restaurants are staying open during the holiday. For some, this has become an alternative to the traditional meal, though I’m not certain it should be a welcome one, since the average fast-food sandwich has the calorie content of a Thanksgiving plate-mound. Personally, I’d take a pound of turkey over a pound of grease and fat without hesitation, even if it meant I had to cook it.
We press on, though, dismissing all the troubling issues of life and remembering the many things we have to be thankful for. We are thankful for happy, healthy children, and a good home (that we didn’t burn down during the cooking); we are thankful for cartoon marathons when we are trapped in the kitchen; we are thankful for the fact that the mid term elections ended political ads (for the time being), and we are thankful for brothers and sisters, and good friends, though they be far away.
Now, I wonder if there’s any of my ‘food of the gods’ gravy left in the fridge. . .
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