Thanksgiving - A, um, Story

Ah. It's Turkey-Day. Thanksgiving Day. The day we give thanks that a bunch of scraggly, stinky, disease-ridden Europeans who stuffed themselves like a, well, like stuffing in a turkey, into three big, somewhat seaworthy, nasty-smelling ships and headed away from their home.

Finally, after months of sea-sickness, numerous deaths, a mercy-killing or two and way too many games of pictionary (causing some of the mercy killings), they crashed upon the shores of the New World, America, naming the new land after nobody on those ships.

What greeted them was a world of expectations, future possibilities, countless discoveries, endless misery, big nasty bugs, deadly snakes, spiders, poison-ivy, athlete's foot, pilgrim's foot and assorted rashes of the late-night, itchy-scratchy kind.

Shortly after they got here they befriended a few of the present inhabitants. Inaptly, they named them Indians -- the Europeans had no idea where they were -- and they developed a close and personal friendship with them. This friendship gave the Europeans the liberty to teach them, learn from them, rob them, plunder them, kill them and then have them over for dinner a year or so later. Vichysoisse and burritos completely out of the question because someone left the sauce pan and salsa at the port, they turned to their new friends for advice.

So the Indians took the bull by the horns. Realizing the bull was way too much food for such a small group of people, they cooked other things. And cook they did. There was plenty of corn, cornbread, maze, cornmeal cake, corn muffins, cornbread stuffing, corn-on-the-cob, white corn, candy corn and cheese-flavored popcorn. To that they added a big, ugly, gamey-tasting foul-so dry after cooking, that the pilgrims were heard screaming for liquids days after -- and they were set.

Then they all sat down together -- Indians on one end, Europeans on the other -- just like the Europeans taught them -- and they said their prayer of thanks.

Dear God,

Thanks for letting us live. The ride over wasn't bad enough -- what with the rickets, scurvy and dysentery -- to make us believe in a malevolent god, you had to give us a bunch of half-naked savages as cooking counsels, gardening advisors and best friends.

God, all they eat is corn. This stuff doesn't digest well. I'm wondering if we're getting any nutritional benefit from it.

Anyway, thanks for everything. Please send more people. We're very lonely for white people and for the last two weeks I've had my eye on this squaw and some of the sheep we brought over.

Amen,

Billy

And they all sat down together, but separate, and shared a meal together, but separate. Giving thanks for the paltry, horrid existence they were tricked into living, they promised each other that there would never again be one-way tickets for the Nina. The Pinta and the Santa Maria had exclusive agreements with a local travel agency which couldn't be altered.

It was a glorious Wednesday afternoon that they ate their meal. Stuffing themselves on corn products, by-products and chemically-created flavor enhancers, they wondered often how this meal would serve them in the long, hard, cold, bitter, biting years to come. Then they got sad and moody for a little while.

And it was a glorious Wednesday night that they would find themselves rolling around in their beds of hay, groaning in pain from not having cooked the Turkey enough to kill the viruses. They made a note to themselves to invent a bicarbonate.

Billy stood up proudly, caught everyone's attention (he also caught syphilis, but that's another story) and announced that everyone would be off the next day, to which the Indians laughed out loud-because they had everyday off -- and the pilgrims smiled cautiously not knowing why the Indians laughed. But, Billy continued, Friday would be a day of work.

One of the Indians stood up, pulled his buffalo skirt tight (causing more than one woman to faint at the size of the Indian knife hanging low and sharp from his loins), and suggested through gestures, sign language, a drawing or two and a quick game of charades, that it might be better if they moved Thanksgiving to Thursday.

It was better, the Indian hopped out in a rain-dance of communication (or possibly signalling that his bladder was full), to have a two-day holiday before a weekend than have one day of work in-between, because only one day of work was unproductive and nobody did anything on that one day of work anyway.

Billy agreed. Of course, he wasn't really sure what he agreed to until the next year, but everyone seemed happy.

And that is how the second Thanksgiving, and all Thanksgivings, until the end of Thanksgiving as we know it -- some time around 1964 -- came to be on Thursdays.

Beneath all the good will, animosity, hateful underlying feelings for each other's way of life, and the occasional trade-rape (which was much more productive than the Indian/Indian and European/European type because so many more diseases were spread) filled their nights and colored their days. It was through this general ill-will and fear that they developed a relationship that would span hundreds of years and result in many tax-free casinos.

So goes the story of the the first feast of thanks in the history of the strange, wonderful, young, plentiful, warmongering, belligerent country just left of the Atlantic.

Happy Thanksgiving!

©1995 Gonzo Schexnayder