the passionate ailurophile

I had to laugh when I saw this picture on The BenSpark.  Go and take a look, it’s okay, I’ll wait…

Yesterday, I was listening to some channel on XM, forget which one, as I keep changing it when I get bored.   Some guy was talking about how there are more traffic accidents on Thanksgiving than any other day of the year, even more than New Year’s Eve.  You’d think that NYE would be the worst, due to all of the drunks and all, but nope, not so.

Then it occurred to me that there’s a reason why there is probably more drunk driving on Toikey Day than on other holidaze.  So many people don’t get along with their families, yet feel pressured to go and be with them on Thanksgiving, year after year.  Sometimes getting drunk is the only way to cope, to get through the day.  I know, I’ve lived through this sort of thing myself.  I HATED being pressured to go to my ex’s family’s Thanksgiving dinner, which was almost always held at his aunt’s house.  I didn’t get along with most of these people, and the feeling was mutual.  The aunt herself was one of the few I did like.

I guess what I really resented was being robbed of the whole cooking of the Toikey Day dinner thing.  I LOVE doing the whole nine yards, and every year that I was cheated out of it just made me more and more resentful.  I was never allowed to even help with cooking, only with cleaning.  Well, their food sucked, anyway, their loss.

Good thing that they always had plenty of beer at these farces of Thanksgivings, because I really did need as much as I could drink just to survive it all.  The only things I was ever thankful for during those years was the beer, and the fact that I made it through another holiday with this freak show.

Things are much better now.  All Mike wants to do on Thanksgiving is sit on his butt, watch TV, and eat when the time comes.  Sheesh, if we had to fly or drive out to Ohio to spend the day with his nutcase mother, I’d have to hook myself up to a beer IV to cope with it all.  Good thing Mike feels the same way!  He can call her if he wants to, but that’s about as much as we both can stand.

The only plus would be that she’d probably let me cook.   According to Mike, his mother was never a very good cook.  She used to buy these really tough cuts of beef, the sort that you’d use for pot roast or beef stew, and cut them into “steaks” and cook them that way.  needless to say, they were impossible to chew.  Super cheap cuts of meat like that are best braised, cooked for a long, slow time in liquid.

And if she served corn with the beef, she called it “corned beef”.  I swear, I am NOT making this up.  She really, truly thought that corned beef was simply beef served with a side of corn.

My feeling about the whole thing, about the sign in Drew’s photograph…you can’t help it as to what family you are born into.  Some people are very lucky, and have nice, supportive families who they love spending time with.  And others were born into families who try to put the fun back into dysfunction, but that only happens on sitcoms.  In reality, families like the one I walked away from almost 30 years ago, were full of nothing but verbal abuse, guilt trips, and assorted other unhealthy crap.  Who needs that?  Sometimes the only way to save yourself is to just walk away and not look back.  Life is too short to waste time on such people.

And then, you create your own family, your own traditions.  Family is not always people that you are related to.  It’s those you love and care about enough to want to spend important holidaze with.   Nowadays, Thanksgiving is a day I look forward to, when I used to dread it.  And that is the way it should be.

Of course, this is not to say you can’t enjoy your booze anyway…we have some nice beer and wine for the holiday.  But there’s a difference between drinking so much just to forget, and enjoying some good beer, wine, or spirits for a day to remember.

Happy Thanksgiving!