Happy Thanksgiving Y'all

In 20+ years of writing here I've apparently never written anything specifically for Thanksgiving. That seems odd, but Google doesn't lie. There are no Thanksgiving posts on this site.

Thanksgiving was never a big deal for us. My Dad was USAF and except for 1 or 2 years in my pre-kindergarten years, we never lived within a days drive of either of my parents' hometowns. Instead we loaded up the Ford Maverick or later the LTD II and spent a couple of weeks visiting family each summer. Looking back, that was probably better as we got to relax and spend significant time with family, instead of trying to cram a lot of family time into one long weekend.

What I do remember about Thanksgiving when I was younger was that it was a party at our house. My parents were very young parents, so many of their friends on base were still single. Thanksgiving often involved my parents inviting friends over that were alone and far away from home on Thanksgiving. And given that this was the 70s, everybody drank a lot and had a good time late into the night.

As an adult I still don't make a big deal about Thanksgiving. Our daughter away at college (actually grad school now) doesn't even come home because it seems silly to go to the hassle and expense to fly home for 3 days when she'll be back for Christmas break 3 weeks later anyway. We hang out at home and cook the traditional dinner, but even when we had china (we gave it all to another family member in the great downsizing purge of 2017) we didn't bother to dust it off and use it on Thanksgiving.

All that said, I really do appreciate Thanksgiving. It's the only major holiday we have that is really focused on the idea of family and being thankful for what we have, without mixing it up with religion and excluding a bunch of people that worship the wrong god, or no god at all. And because of that, I really hate the whole idea of Black Friday encroaching on it. (I'm talking to you - every store opening at 6 PM tonight to sell discounted flat screen TVs.) Seriously, this should be the one day that retail commerce mostly shuts down in the US. I'm old enough to remember that if you ran out of beer or forgot the cranberry sauce you were just screwed. Nothing was open on Thanksgiving. I don't remember it ever ruining the day, maybe because we all were better at planning back then because we knew we couldn't buy beer on Thanksgiving.

Make Thanksgiving Great Again - keep WalMart and Best Buy closed all day.

My mom is due here in a couple of hours so I'm going to try to forget about the fact that I learned yesterday that my health insurance costs are going up a minimum of $6000 next year, and just enjoy drinking some beer and eating the turkey that is currently enjoying an acidic brine bath in a cooler on the front porch.

Happy Thanksgiving Y'all.