Every year, Americans do what we do best: sit around a table to observe a once-meaningful holiday because we’d look funny if we didn’t.
Me: Hey, Ted from Accounting. Big four day weekend, eh?
Ted from Accounting: Yep, gonna eat turkey with the family and watch some football. You?
Me: Oh, I’m going to Aruba for the long weekend to collect orgasms.
TfA: Well, that makes too much sense. Freak.
Thanksgiving, like every other U.S.-observed holiday, has auspicious, yet bullsh-t, origins. But if you boil that bathwater past the paper headdresses, you find a story that doesn’t matter anymore today: a group of proto-Americans are starving to death, yet finally scrape up enough farming to survive … until winter starts in earnest.
They’re thankful for managing with what they’ve got to enjoy each others’ presence, which ironically helps spread the cholera.
We don’t have that problem anymore. Even if we catch childhood leukemia, we still get an awesome last wish. (That’s only because Leonard Nimoy can’t catch leukemia from his Make-A-Wish cancer kid.) And we don’t really enjoy each others’ company. If it weren’t for Thanksgiving, entire families would never see each other except to marry or bury someone.
And we definitely aren’t just scraping by. Outside of a certain percentage of poor people, the modern Thanksgiving is a modern festival of consumer distractions. The table is full of food that will go uneaten, and those who attempt to finish it off will slip into a gluttony coma on the leather sofa. This happens while everyone watches a parade full of cartoon characters selling toys, the latests must-see TV stars and the pirate of plastic productions, Santa himself. Then there’s football, which features players goosed up on the latest pharmaceuticals beating Vegas odds so the owner can sell more ball caps to guys trying to find cool new ways to cover up bald spots.
Even the idea of a feast in today’s America is ridiculous. The idea of a feast is to celebrate having plenty when you normally have little. Seen those obesity numbers lately?
So, with all that in mind, here’s my list of the things that I am thankful for this year: Continue reading Take it from Snee: I’m thankful
When it comes to tourism, a catchy slogan is really important. I (heart) NY. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Don’t mess with Texas. Actually, that last one was a slogan the state government came up with to keep people from littering. It was later hijacked by a current president of ours.