Happy Thanksgiving from L.A.

Once again Thanksgiving is upon us. A time for relatives and friends to gather together and enjoy a huge turkey and or Ham dinner with all the trimmings and express their love and thankfulness for the bounty that lies in front of them. Giving thanks for their fruitful and abundant lives.

I can’t really find anything wrong with that, except maybe the conflicting histories of Thanksgivings foundation, if you will. Oh no, is he going to get into all that horrible “we slaughtered the natives and invited the survivors to dinner” stuff again.  Well no. OK maybe a little, but first let’s look at what we’re doing here. We get all the family members together in one place, even the ones who are not talking to each other right now. My parents’ generation would have mom in the kitchen cooking a huge turkey while all the side dishes are heating up on the stove. She would spend all day working on this yearly feast. Maybe Aunt Mary and little Audrey were in there helping out.

The guys are all sitting around the living room or den, drinking beer, watching football and arguing about who’s the best running back of all time. I like what Jim Brown said when he was asked; “Would you say you were the best running back in history?” And he said, “Well if I said any one of the great running backs that have played this game were the best, then I would be insulting the rest of the very few men that can do what we do”. Only the best would say that!

This year we’re doing things differently. Moms getting pretty old and half the family is so far away we don’t know when we’ll see everyone again. So my wife had an idea. Let’s call “Marie Calendars” and order their thanksgiving dinner premade. Well, I thought this was a little cheesy. I know my wife works very hard at the office and has little time for meal planning much less baking. So I said, OK let’s do it. Even though I knew we would be the only weird pathetic family ordering a takeout turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. So, two weeks before the holiday the wife calls in the order. “What do you mean sold out?” She said into the phone.

Apparently we are not the only folks thinking, who has time to cook all day any more. It seems that my generation is not the Betty Crocker generation, especially in Los Angeles! I’m sure plenty of people still spend all day preparing Thanksgiving dinners, however I suspect there are much fewer than those that came before us. Lucky for us Wholefoods still had a few openings on holiday turkey dinners so we are saved.

Now the only thing left to do is to discuss the history of Thanksgiving back in the 1600’s with the pilgrims and the Indians and all that. Nah, just kidding, maybe next year. But if you would like to really know there are plenty of history tutors at TutorZ.com!