Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one of the best holidays of the year because during thanksgiving the only real responsibilities you have are to eat and drink as much food as humanly possible. After that you watch some football and then you eat a snack and just hang out. It is somewhat ironic that, on a day that was allegedly first celebrated by the Puritans, gorging and extended periods of sloth are the order of the day.

I used to have Thanksgiving with my family. It was a traditional extended family dinner not unlike the Norman Rockwell painting but in recent years my dinners have taken some serious downswings from time to time. The all time low that I can recall was spending the holiday alone in my hell-hole of an apartment in Brooklyn. The room itself was enough to bum anyone out. Picture a single exposed lightbulb, prison style, ugly brown painted wood floors and the usual metal cabinets that won't really close right. Anyway, I cooked an entire thanksgiving meal by myself and for myself, which consisted of the usual things but all cooked in the most appalling poverty method. I put so much effort into cooking my food that when I saw how it turned out I was kind of stunned. I bought some turkey breasts and cooked them in a toaster oven, which made them so unappealing that I couldn't really finish. The rest of the food was more or less the same. The meal was truly a mockery of what the feast was supposed to be. I ate the meal sitting on the corner of my bed watching TV. I felt heartsick and a little sick to my stomach.

In later years, I had a little better luck, though the theme of eating alone was a recurring one. Perhaps the best of these solitary thanksgivings was the one in which I decided to go out of the house to hunt down a good Thanksgiving meal. Finding little, I finally saw a poster in the window of a Thai restaurant for a Thai style thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, my only company was the guy at the next table, who spent the whole meal talking loudly into his cell phone, but on the positive side the meal cemented a long lasting love of Thai food, which has now become my favorite. So, I guess the key is that regardless of how fucked up your holidays are, you have to try to make something out of them and hope you get lucky.