Rantings Diversified

It’s that time of year again.
Here we go.
Consumers consuming with blatant consumerism.
This year the sales will start on Thanksgiving Day. That’s right not on Black Friday but instead on T-day itself. Kmart is open 3pm until 9pm on Thursday. The ONLY day of the year that Bass Pro Shop is closed is Christmas Day. What greedy little voles own and run these stores?

Well, this is what we all expect to hear about this time of year.

I remember Thanksgivings filled with Aunts and Uncles and cousins and cousins and more cousins. I remember more people wandering the corridors of my parent’s house than I can remember names of. We hosted the Spengler’s from Boston, the Jordan’s from Washington DC, The Silliman’s from Allentown, The Husic’s from NY as well as the Reuwer’s from Chicago and the Macmillan’s from Danbury. Sometimes we were lucky enough to have the Fitzgerald’s from Lexington. The Ryan’s almost always came for Thanksgiving dinner.
There were always a couple of games on TV on Thanksgiving Day and GOD help us if it was a Notre Dame game.
Being one of the youngest of a quarter million (sic) cousins I was always relegated to one of the many folding card tables for dinner, usually in the living room or the den. I’m not complaining, mind you, I would see everyone stuffed into the dining room and was glad not to be there. Hey, I was a kid. Anyways if we got put in the den then we could turn on the TV and watch cartoons.
We kids were always sent outside after dinner to play whatever games kids then played, tag, football, baseball, basketball, four-square, etc.
I remember, once, coming inside, to the kitchen and finding my Mom sound asleep on the red bench in our kitchen and my Aunts Jeanne, Theresa and Bitty cleaning up as well as a few of my older sisters. This was one of those years that everyone and their brothers were at the house. Well at least everyone we were related to…and their brothers.
It was a house full of people and noise and kids running around everywhere. It was my youth. It is a brain full of memories.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Let’s give thanks for what we have rather than moan about what we don’t have.

In 1992 I had an open house kinda’ party for the holidays and I even went as far as to send invitations.
On this invitation I wrote my theory of holiday traffic. In it I stated that there are huge farms in Iowa or Nebraska, or any one of those states that we harbor just a bit of doubt as to their existence, that breed bad drivers and rude people. These people are released in to the world on the day after Thanksgiving and returned to these breeding co-operatives at an unspecified time after the New Year.
I still believe this.

Happy Thanksgiving!