Best & Worst Things About Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is right around the corner. Sort of. It's really not close enough to Thanksgiving to be a writing a Thanksgiving blog like this, but that's what the Blog Wheel chose. If you don't know what the Blog Wheel is, it's when I ask Twitter to come up with topics for me to blog about. Then I put them on the wheel to select a topic. Basically I just ask Twitter to do half my job for me when I'm feeling lazy. I used to do the Blog Wheel every week, but then I stopped, because quite frankly nobody reads these. They get shockingly low amounts of clicks. But fuck it. It's kinda fun on Twitter. Doing one every now and then doesn't hurt anything. Just means our website will have one less "Taylor Swift walks down the street" blog this week. For that I apologize.
Best: Wednesday Night Before Thanksgiving at The Bar When You're in Your 20's
You get to see a whole bunch of people you forgot existed. Some of them are nice to see, others are bad to see. You do some good reminiscing about the good ol' days. You learn which of your classmates are rich, which ones are in prison, which ones are dead, etc. If you grew up in a small town, but now live in a big city, you can say cool things like, "Haha wow this $12 tab would be $80 in New York", and all your friends who still live in a small town will think to themselves, "Wow, John is so cool for living in a city."
Worst: Wednesday Night at The Bar When You're in Your Late 20's
Once you start seeing kids who were in like 5th grade when you graduated high school it starts to get sad. Then you realize the reason people your age aren't there anymore is because they're well-functioning adults with families of their own and can't just get blackout drunk for no reason. The only friends you do see are the kinda sad ones. You leave the bar feeling worse about yourself.
Best: Football
A full day of football curbs the awkwardness of spending time with your extended family. Should you find yourself in an unwanted conversation with your racist uncle, just steer the conversation away from his plan to fix our country and towards football. Just keep in mind he will at one point tell you that Dak Prescott should be playing running back. Don't bother bringing up statistics, or the fact that Dak Prescott only runs a 4.8, which isn't nearly quick enough to be a running back in the league. Simply nod your head and say something like, "It's a crime that full backs have been phased out of the league." That should get him to move on. Whatever he says, it still beats any non-football conversation you're going to have.
Worst: Turkey
Turkey is unequivocally the worst part of Thanksgiving. It's really the only thing holding it back from being a perfect holiday. A Turkey is a subpar bird. It lacks flavor. It's dry. It takes way too much effort to cook. We should all band together and decide that moving forward the official bird of Thanksgiving will be duck. Duck is an underrated bird. I had some duck poutine the other day and it was fantastic. I see ducks everywhere, so I know we have plenty of them. I'd even rather have pigeon than turkey. We just have to stop pretending that turkey is good.
Best: Watching the Dog show for 10 Minutes at Some Point
Usually at half time of the first game you can turn the channel to the Westminster Dog Show to watch a group of dogs be judged. I like judging the dogs myself. I say things like, "That dog fucking sucks", or "That's a good dog", or "My friend has a dog like that." Things of that nature.
Worst: Watching The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
For some reason, the women in your family will want to have it on in the morning, despite it being some of the worst programming the world has to offer. There are zero redeemable qualities. The balloons are sort of ok I guess, but the talent is deplorable. There will be like 10 minutes of a New Jersey high school band playing their own fight song along with some below average baton twirlers. That will be followed by the 3rd place finisher of American Idol 19 singing an original song that nobody has heard of. Then they'll interview some wallpaper celebrity like Elisabeth Moss about her favorite side dish. It's a who's who of "who the fuck cares about these people".
Best: 4 Days Off Work
Unless you work for one of those companies that makes you work the Friday after Thanksgiving. Those companies belong in hell. Unless it's a restaurant, or bar, or gas station, or any business I might need something from that Friday. Those places should all remain open for my convenience. But if your place of work doesn't affect me personally you should be closed.
Worst: The Sunday After Thanksgiving
You're hit with with the harsh reality that you're about to have to do everything you've been putting off for the last month at work until "after Thanksgiving". Big day for the Sunday scaries. But honestly. once you go back to work you can just push everything off until after Christmas, so I suppose it's not too terrible.
Best: Laughing During the Family Prayer
I hear a prayer once per year, and it happens at my family Thanksgiving. Someone gives God a nice heartfelt thank you for blessing our family, and for some reason it's the funniest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. Can't explain why. But my brothers and I hold back tears from laughing every time.
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Worst: Forcing Yourself to Puke Up Your Entire Meal So You Can Go Back for Seconds
Like the rich people in Hunger Games who eat a giant feast then purge so they can go back for seconds while the rest of the world starves. Don't be like District 1. That's fucked up. Not only is it wasteful, but it's basically bulimia. Wildly unhealthy behavior. The only time it's ok to force yourself to puke is from drinking or drugs.
Best: Getting Drunk and Starting Political Conversations
If the Cowboys game is a blowout, and you've had 12 glasses of Thanksgiving Sangria, and you're just kinda bored in general, start teeing up politically charged topics. Maybe take the remote and "accidently" flip the channel to Fox News or MSNBC. Whichever one invokes more of a reaction in your family. Maybe float out something like, "I think Hunter Biden is just misunderstood." or "The thing about abortion is.." - then just start coughing and excuse yourself to the bathroom.
Worst: Divorced People
I've never had to deal with this because my family are all God-fearing Christians, but I imagine at some Thanksgivings there are divorced couples who still get together over the holiday for the children. Like maybe your aunt cheated on your uncle with their hot neighbor Tim, now her and Tim are officially dating, and against everyone's advice she thought it would be a good idea to shove him down your throat over the holiday because, "we're going to have to learn how to co-exist. We might as well rip the band-aid off." She'll come up to you and be like, "Hey John, you like football right? Well Tim works at Dick's Sporting Goods. Why don't you talk for an hour." Then you're sitting there making small talk over brands of shoes or something. Idk. I've never actually experienced that, but that's definitely happened somewhere and I'm certain it sucked.
Best: Being Thankful
You thank you friends and family for being great. They thank you for being great. You share a laugh about how great you all are. You talk about how thankful you are for the pilgrims inventing Thanksgiving cause it's just so much fucking fun. Just a big ol' happy thankful dick sucking fest.
Worst: Genocide
Thanksgiving is a stark reminder of the genocide of millions of Native Americans, theft of their land, and a never ending assault of their culture. We did a lot of really uncool things to Native American's. Like small pox blankets. One time we stole a bunch of sacred land from the Lakota Sioux, and we carved giant stone white people into the side of their mountain (Mount Rushmore). That was rude. But now that Washington's football team name has been changed to the Commanders we don't have to feel bad anymore. At least that's why my uncle told me.