Tag Archives: Bring back Thanksgiving!

Seriously people: No Christmas decorations or music yet. Bring Back Thanksgiving!!!

I first published this post in 2009 and reposted it in November 2010. Every year, as early as towards the end of October, I found myself aghast coming face to face with Christmas merchandise and sometimes even MUSIC when the leaves are still sporting brilliant red and yellow.

Seriously? What the F people?

What about Thanksgiving? You know, the quintessential American holiday? The way I see it, FAUX NEWS should be carrying this “Bring Thanksgiving Back” flag if they talk about being the TRUE Americans all the fucking damn time.

The following is my now annual (so it seems *sigh*) tirade against the demise of the significance of Thanksgiving in the face of overwhelming commercialism…

Yeah tirade! Aren’t you glad that I am back in more ways than one?!

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I started campaigning for a forced postponement, a temporary deferral, of celebrating Christmas until AFTER Thanksgiving Day four five six years ago.  I even registered for the domain name: BringBackThanksgiving.com (which is still available… I am sad to confirm… Any takers?)  I stopped paying for it after two years when I realized that with a full time job and three boys to take care of, I simply did not have the capacity to deal with Microsoft FrontPage. (Yikes. Do you remember the days, the days before Blogger, WordPress, etc. when one had to use a software such as FrontPage in order to have one’s own website? *shudder*)

“Curb your enthusiasm!” I beseech you.  “As you recover from the sugar high from all the Halloween candies.  As you dispose of the spider webs, the goblins, the mummy tombs, the rotten carved pumpkins.”

Please, oh, please don’t switch directly from Orange and Black to Red and Green.  However tempting it is when you move all the Halloween boxes down to your basement and see all the Christmas boxes beckoning at you. The smiling Santa with the chubby cheeks.  The snowman. The reindeer.  Resist the temptation: Didn’t Jesus die on the cross partly to teach us this lesson?  Be strong for the sake of your children.

The children need you to show them that, Yes, you believe in the meaning and significance of Thanksgiving Day. Yes, it is important that we take one day out to deliberately remember and show gratitude to all the people who add meanings to our lives, to all the material goods that we are blessed enough to own. To strangers who give you a smile in the street and thus brighten your day. To strangers who by merely doing their jobs are making the world a better, safer place.

My heart aches upon seeing houses adorned with Christmas lights right after, sometimes even before, Halloween.  Of course I am not intimating that the homeowners are therefore not thankful.  No siree.  I am simply dismayed that the significance of Thanksgiving, the arguably ONE holiday that we should all be able to agree on and celebrate, is undermined sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas.

(I admit: I may be putting my foot in my mouth by saying this. I have no clear idea how the native Americans take this holiday though I suspect there must be a lot of conflicting feelings. Do they sometimes wish that Squanto were not so kind as to assist the pilgrims? FWIW, by reading “Thanksgiving: A Native American View” and “Teaching About Thanksgiving“, I am convinced that Thanksgiving is indeed deeper and bigger than just the Pilgrims and the Indians… I hope I do not offend should anyone of Native American descent stops by this post…)

I blame the turkey.

You heard me right. It is the turkey’s fault. In terms of merchandising, turkeys are just not as attractive as say, bunnies, chicks, Santa Clause, snowman, reindeer, and so on.  I have not seen any child hugging a plush Turkey toy lovingly.

turkey

To be honest, that red thing hanging down the throat freaks me out.  Pardon me for being crass, but it always reminds me of testicles. I don’t know why. But it does.

Many, especially Hallmark (bless their heart!), have tried to turn the turkey into an adorable icon:  but seriously, how adorable can you make a turkey?

Turkey for eating

Even more sickening is that in these cutesy depictions of turkeys, they are all forced to celebrate the event in which they will be slaughtered, cooked and eaten! The abomination!

No cute icons, no easy way for merchandising. No easy way for merchandising, no rampant commidification of Thanksgiving. No rampant commidification of Thanksgiving, no shelf space at your local drugstores and grocery stores.

(I am grateful for no longer being in the academia which affords me the opportunity to posit theories full of holes and preaches them on the Internet with no qualms… I am like Glenn Beck on an anti-Turkey path…)

But with your help, we can stem the tide.  We can start it from inside of our homes.

Perhaps we can all start a tradition of having each one of the family members mention one thing that they are grateful for, every day, in the month of November.  No matter how small or how trivial.

Perhaps we can start a quiet movement to resist the Red and Green color scheme from popping up inside of our own houses. Until the day after Thanksgiving.

On the morning of November 26 this year (because November 25, Black Friday, is reserved for Competitive Shopping, or most likely, nursing a stomach ache and hangover headache), I am moving up the Christmas Tree from our basement first thing in the morning.  I am really looking forward to it. And to optimize my effort of transforming my house into a winter wonderland for Christmas, I shall keep the decorations up until after Valentine’s day. Thank goodness for the lllloooonnnngggg winter here. That is, of course, until one of you starts a campaign for bringing back Valentine’s Day…


Thanksgiving is over. We can be snarky again.

F I N A L L Y!

Ok. I am joking. Well, maybe 50%. I am most likely kidding on the square, as is my MO.

I have been thinking about being thankful, for all the right reasons, like everybody else around Thanksgiving time.

When I went to the grocery store across the street for the fourth time in two days yesterday afternoon, I asked the cashier lady what time they would be closing.

“7 pm. Why? You want to come back again?” She laughed.

“No. I was complaining to you about coming here so many times, but then I remembered that you are still working on Thanksgiving Day, so I am kind of embarrassed for being a whiner.”

Somehow I couldn’t get our brief exchange out of my head.

How many times have I complained to a cashier in a store about my day? To the teachers at my kids’ childcare center? To a salesclerk? To the person behind a counter, any counter? To all these other people earning minimum wages (or hopefully higher) and lousy healthcare / retirement benefits (if any) who probably at that moment just wanted to wring my neck but were able to wear a plastic smile because their jobs required them to?

Here are what I am thankful for, for the not so politically correct reasons:

I am thankful that working for me is a choice and not a necessity.

I am thankful that though I work, I do not carry the stress as a sole bread earner.

I am thankful that I am able to treat my work and responsibility as the “second” income and therefore I am not as stressed out as my husband.

I am thankful that my life is comfortable enough that I can afford to be plagued by angst, ennui and neurosis.

I am thankful that my reality affords me to worry about ideology.

I am thankful that I can afford to be generous.

I am thankful for not having to think at all in order to come up with things that I should be thankful for.

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I promised that I’d be snarky in the title so I cannot possibly let you down. Here it is…

I am thankful that Sarah Palin proved yet again that she has no business commenting on political issues or any other serious issues.

“Obviously, we’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies.” — Sarah Palin on Glenn Beck’s radio show

(Yes, I’ll admit: it took me a while to try and work this gem into this post…)

Freak out!

Almost 3 pm the day before Thanksgiving. House. Not cleaned. Laundry. Not done. Thanksgiving dishes. Not planned. Ham. Not picked up from the store yet. Pies. Ditto. Grocery list. Nope. Grocery shopping. Ha!

My parents-in-law are flying in tomorrow arriving at 11 am. Vegetarian brother-in-law. 3 pm.

I am running around not knowing which task to tackle first. Mr. Monk has started the timer for 20 minutes: time to leave me alone so I can regroup and breathe. But he kept on coming over to talk to me so he graciously agreed to add 5 more minutes to the timer.

I am ashamed to admit: This scene happens every Thanksgiving.

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Oh, yeah, I had to come back and ETA (“Edited to add”): Tomorrow is also Mr. Monk’s 8th birthday. Yeah. I forgot. I have been forgetting it every day. I just did, even after he reminded me today:

“Will you at least wish me a happy birthday tomorrow morning?”

So add to the To-Do-List: Buy birthday presents for son. And do not forget his birthday again!

While I go freaking out some more, running around town like a headless chicken turkey, please enjoy this.

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Or this version by The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. (Not kidding, Elly! In fact, I won’t be surprised if you have applied for a chair there already…)

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Norman Rockwell can take the turkey and stuff it!

Thanksgiving.

I had an existential crisis last year when my then almost-7-year-old Mr. Monk started talking about a golden turkey. Complete with legs wrapped around in silver tinfoil and tied with red strings.

I honestly had no idea where he got the idea. I still don’t.

But an idea he did have. In fact, he was convinced that on Thanksgiving Day we were all going to sit around the table when, voila, out of the oven, a golden bird would be brought out on a silver platter and everybody would Oooo and Ahhh. And we would live happily ever after.

Ok, the last line was from my sarcastic self.

I hated breaking the news to him. Earth to Mr. Monk. Earth to Mr. Monk.

“Are you going to eat the turkey?”

“Hmmmm. Nope?”

“So you just want to look at the turkey?”

“Hmmmm. Yeah.”

Norman. (Please imagine me saying it the way Jerry Seinfeld says “Newman!”)

“Norman Rockwell can take the turkey and stuff it!” I thought.

That being said, I do like all the parodies made of the now iconic Freedom From Want. The following is a repost of all the Freedom from Want parodies I could find with some exciting new additions.

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Thanksgiving-Freedom-from-Want

Thanksgiving-reality

disney thanksgiving

thanksgiving super heroes

mad-lindsay-nicole-britney-paris

the truth behind the thanksgiving bird


This is what I am talking about!

This is what I am talking about! Thanks, Elly, for finding this for me!


Bring back Thanksgiving! Please, no Christmas decorations until Black Friday…

This is a post originally published last November. For some reason, ever since September, a lot of people have searched for “turkey” and landed on my post from last year, skewing my stat counts since I know all of them got the pictures of the turkey and left without even looking at my blog.

Tis unfortunate. Not because I am vain (well, I am) and I want to treat the increased page views as real numbers (well, I do) but because I really wish more people will heed the plea, not just by me but also by some other bloggers, for example, Midwestern Mama said, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… And frankly, its pissing me the fuck off!”

The following is my tirade against the demise of the significance of Thanksgiving in the face of overwhelming commercialism…

Yeah tirade! Aren’t you glad that I am back in more ways than one?!

.

.

I started campaigning for a forced postponement, a temporary deferral, of celebrating Christmas until AFTER Thanksgiving Day four five years ago.  I even registered for the domain name: BringBackThanksgiving.com (which is still available… Any takers?)  I stopped paying for it after two years when I realized that with a full time job and three boys to take care of, I simply did not have the capacity to deal with Microsoft FrontPage. (Yikes. Do you remember the days, the days before Blogger, WordPress, etc. when one had to use a software such as FrontPage in order to have one’s own website? *shudder*)

“Curb your enthusiasm!” I beseech you.  “As you recover from the sugar high from all the Halloween candies.  As you dispose of the spider webs, the goblins, the mummy tombs, the rotten carved pumpkins.”

Please, oh, please don’t switch directly from Orange and Black to Red and Green.  However tempting it is when you move all the Halloween boxes down to your basement and see all the Christmas boxes beckoning at you. The smiling Santa with the chubby cheeks.  The snowman. The reindeer.  Resist the temptation: Didn’t Jesus die on the cross partly to teach us this lesson?  Be strong for the sake of your children.

The children need you to show them that, Yes, you believe in the meaning and significance of Thanksgiving Day. Yes, it is important that we take one day out to deliberately remember and show gratitude to all the people who add meanings to our lives, to all the material goods that we are blessed enough to own. To strangers who give you a smile in the street and thus brighten your day. To strangers who by merely doing their jobs are making the world a better, safer place.

My heart aches upon seeing houses adorned with Christmas lights right after, sometimes even before, Halloween.  Of course I am not intimating that the homeowners are therefore not thankful.  No siree.  I am simply dismayed that the significance of Thanksgiving, the arguably ONE holiday that we should all be able to agree on and celebrate, is undermined sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas.

(I admit: I may be putting my foot in my mouth by saying this. I have no clear idea how the native Americans take this holiday though I suspect there must be a lot of conflicting feelings. Do they sometimes wish that Squanto were not so kind as to assist the pilgrims? FWIW, by reading “Thanksgiving: A Native American View” and “Teaching About Thanksgiving“, I am convinced that Thanksgiving is indeed deeper and bigger than just the Pilgrims and the Indians… I hope I do not offend should anyone of Native American descent stops by this post…)

I blame the turkey.

You heard me right. It is the turkey’s fault. In terms of merchandising, turkeys are just not as attractive as say, bunnies, chicks, Santa Clause, snowman, reindeer, and so on.  I have not seen any child hugging a plush Turkey toy lovingly.

turkey

To be honest, that red thing hanging down the throat freaks me out.  Pardon me for being crass, but it always reminds me of testicles. I don’t know why. But it does.

Many, especially Hallmark (bless their heart!), have tried to turn the turkey into an adorable icon:  but seriously, how adorable can you make a turkey?

Turkey for eating

Even more sickening is that in these cutesy depictions of turkeys, they are all forced to celebrate the event in which they will be slaughtered, cooked and eaten! The abomination!

No cute icons, no easy way for merchandising. No easy way for merchandising, no rampant commidification of Thanksgiving. No rampant commidification of Thanksgiving, no shelf space at your local drugstores and grocery stores.

(I am grateful for no longer being in the academia which affords me the opportunity to posit theories full of holes and preaches them on the Internet with no qualms… I am like Glenn Beck on an anti-Turkey path…)

But with your help, we can stem the tide.  We can start it from inside of our homes.

Perhaps we can all start a tradition of having each one of the family members mention one thing that they are grateful for, every day, in the month of November.  No matter how small or how trivial.

Perhaps we can start a quiet movement to resist the Red and Green color scheme from popping up inside of our own houses. Until the day after Thanksgiving.

On the morning of November 27 this year (because November 26, Black Friday, is reserved for Competitive Shopping, or most likely, nursing a stomach ache and hangover headache), I am moving up the Christmas Tree from our basement first thing in the morning.  I am really looking forward to it. And to optimize my effort of transforming my house into a winter wonderland for Christmas, I shall keep the decorations up until after Valentine’s day. Thank goodness for the lllloooonnnngggg winter here. That is, of course, until one of you starts a campaign for bringing back Valentine’s Day…


How pumpkin pies are made…

Happy Thanksgiving!



Thanksgiving has not been forgotten. Well, sort of...

Thanksgiving has not been forgotten. Well, sort of...



Well, yeah, you have to click on this thing below that says “click to continue…” to find out how pumpkin pies are made…

Ready?

Ok.

Are you sure you want to know?

Ok. Fine. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

"How pumpkin pies are made" What do you expect?

"How pumpkin pies are made"* What do you expect?



You are welcome.

* This is one of those “Internet Memes” that have been emailed around. I do not claim any credit for the wit and skills involved in answering this specific mystery (Mystery #2854) in life.

Happy Thanksgiving to all! Except, well, the bird…

Thanksgiving-Freedom-from-Want

Thanksgiving-reality

disney thanksgiving
thanksgiving super heroes
mad-lindsay-nicole-britney-paris
the truth behind the thanksgiving bird

But wait. There is more!

This is what I am talking about!

This is what I am talking about!

Thanks to Elly over at BugginWord for alerting me to this wonderful, modern rendition of Thanksgiving.

Elly has much to thank for: she beat cancer!

Now let’s all go over and say: Happy first year in remission, Elly!

Freedom from Want, Or The Case of the Golden Turkey

Even if you don’t know its name, you must have seen this iconic painting by Norman Rockwell:

Thanksgiving-Freedom-from-Want

The name of the painting is Freedom from Want, by Norman Rockwell in 1943. Ever since its appearance and subsequent permeation into the pop culture and the collective American consciousness, it is also known as Thanksgiving Dinner.

This is the quintessential image conjured up whenever a family feast/celebration is mentioned.

Books, movies, TV shows. Countless re-presentation of this painting serving as emulation, improvement, critique, parody, and commentary of the definition of (“an American”) family, the imagining / celebration / debunking of it.

Mr. Monk asked me to make a turkey for Thanksgiving.

“But I am ordering it from Honey Baked Ham. Just like last year. And actually, just like every year.”

“A real turkey?”

“Hmm. Yes…. Turkey breast.”

Truth be told: the whole family, including my parents-in-law who visit us every Thanksgiving, will NOT touch the dark meat, except me. We are also not big meat eaters. Therefore a small turkey breast makes perfect sense. Waste not. Right?

“That’s NOT a real turkey then.”

“What do you mean it’s not a real turkey? You ate it last year and you liked it.”

“But I want a real turkey. You know, like they show on TV with a lot of people around the table…”

“You mean a whole turkey with skins and bones on a big plate? With the wings and legs and everything?”

“Yup.”

“And there are things tied around the legs and the turkey is surrounded by pretty, fluffy, green, things?” It’s obvious I am woefully unaware of cooking jargons…

“Yup.”

So, he does not really want a turkey, he wants what the TV shows and movies depict as a proper family celebration. I may be able to produce a golden turkey, with silver things and red strings tied around the legs, BUT I would still be unable to produce LOTS OF PEOPLE…

Here is his expectation:

Thanksgiving-Freedom-from-Want

Here is what I plan to deliver:

Thanksgiving-reality

Clearly there is a gap.

This conversation sent me on a trip of soul-searching: Am I not making enough efforts to create the “right” family memories for my children? Am I guilty of depriving my children of living the “American dream”?

You have to forgive me: being a foreigner or maybe just being plain neurotic, I am forever self-conscious of “depriving” my children of the proper “American experiences”. Deep down, out of pride (which as I am well aware is one of the Seven Deadly Sins…) and sheer vanity, I want them to grow up just as American as the next kid can be, in addition to all the global perspectives I am trying to instill in them as well. I don’t want my foreignness to become somehow a liability. Well, like I said, sheer pride and vanity…

I was all ready to make Mr. Monk the turkey after an one-hour long conversation with my lone co-worker who drew diagrams, even a cross-section one, on the white board to explain step by step how to prep and cook a proper Thanksgiving turkey, including where and how and when to put on the silver things on the legs.  I asked Mr. Monk again:

“Mommy will make you a turkey if that’s what you really want for Thanksgiving.”

“He’s not going to eat it!” My husband stepped in.

“Mom. I am NOT going to eat it. Just so you know.” Mr. Monk said somberly.

“So you just want to look at it?”

“Uh-huh.”

Note to Self: Do not watch cooking shows with Mr. Monk again in the hope that he may be tempted to widen his palette beyond plain pasta, white bread, and rice. So far, it has not worked.

Note to Self II: Check Mr. Monk’s Letter to Santa in case he asks for Martha Stewart to be his new mom. Not that I could do anything about it. But it would be good to know if I totally fucked up by not cooking him the golden turkey…

“Bring Back Thanksgiving!” Number One, baby!

I know this is sad on so many different levels… Let’s not even talk about how sad it is that I got so excited over the fact that my “Bring Back Thanksgiving” post is, as of this second, the number one result on Google.

What got me really sad is that not enough people care, or even wonder, about the demise of, the neglect over Thanksgiving sandwiched between the TWO Retail-Friendly holidays. I will not name names. You know who you are, said holidays… Since that would explain why mine shows up on the very top.

But gloat I will, even just for 5 minutes. So…

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Who’s your daddy? Or rather, who’s your emotionally unstable mommy?!

Mind your manners Thanksgiving First Presents Second