It is Sunday, November 25 and there are only 30 days until Christmas.  I know!  Where does the time go?  It seems like only last week my grandsons were going trick or treating …Oh, never mind.  It was last week.  Halloween was delayed until then because of Sandy.  Moving on, it is the birthday of Andrew Carnegie, Gloria Steinem and Murray Schisgal.  On this day in 1817 the first sword swallower in the US performed in New York City, in 1867 Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and Lech Walesa won in Poland’s first popular election, in 1990.  It is Independence Day in Surinam, John F. Kennedy Day in Massachusetts and Onion Market Day in Bern Switzerland (I assume tomorrow will be Breath Saver Day in Bern).

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  I know we did here.  This is one of my favorite holidays.  There are several reasons for that.  One is because it is an opportunity for family to come together and enjoy each other’s company.  Another reason is that it is all about food – eating to excess, resting and then eating some more.  The other reason is because I can now start playing Christmas music. 

 

If it were up to me, I would play Christmas music throughout the year.  Not exclusively, but there would be some all the time.  My wife, the lovely Elaine, likes Christmas music, but feels it should be limited to Christmastime.  She tolerates it on my birthday, but otherwise would rather wait until Thanksgiving.  It is almost like our version of the Macy’s parade, without the floats, balloons, celebrities and crowds of people.  Anyway, the music has started officially.

Let me go back to the eating for a moment.  I love turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, wine, etc.  I love having fruit and candy, then resting so we have room for dessert and coffee.  Dessert was a little meager this year, but we managed.  We only had tassies, pumpkin pie, apple pie, pumpkin cheese pie and blueberry pie. 

The other thing I like is having the leftovers.  What we like to do is get together over the weekend and have “leftover paninis.”  We get bread from the bakery, then build sandwiches with the leftovers – turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and whatever else you want – all in one sandwich and then into the Panini press.  Then we rest and have the leftover pies, but fresh coffee.  A sort of Thanksgiving redux, if you will.

My issue with Thanksgiving is that we have gotten to a point where we ignore the actual holiday and use it as a day to start shopping.  Too bad!  Making money for the retailers is more important than celebrating a holiday that is exclusively ours.  It is not religion-based or ethnic-oriented.  It is just a day to give thanks for family, friends, food and being together.  It is a day to eat and then sleep in front of the TV with our pants unbuttoned while the football game is on.

I suppose there is something exciting about camping outside a store at midnight, guzzling coffee and energy drinks, getting ready to be caught in a stampede of maniacs when the doors open at 5 AM.  For the life of me I cannot imagine what it is, but so many people do it that there must be something.  I think it would be easier to wait a couple weeks and get better deals when the stores start trying to shed inventory.  Better yet, shop online and get free shipping and do it from your house in your pajamas.

This all goes back to something I have been saying for years – put back the moon rocks!  Think about it.  If we had not removed the moon rocks we would not have upset the delicate balance of the moon.  Because of that the tides are affected, which then affects weather patterns, which then causes storms to become larger and more damaging, which then changes the topography of the earth, which then causes storms to change course and not rain where it is needed, which causes droughts, which ruins the corn crops, which means turkeys can’t be fed, which means that there is a turkey shortage, which means that it is harder for us to prepare Thanksgiving meals, which means that we have to open stores on Thanksgiving so that people have something to do instead of eating meals that they can’t have.

So I stand corrected.  Opening stores is actually a humanitarian move by retailers to avoid turkey riots.  I guess it’s all in how you look at it.

By the way, for those of you who were worried, I did get rid of the plant on the deck.