I apologize for not writing anything in forever. I can supply multiple excuses, and evidence of no less than five posts that I started but never finished, but that won't help anyone. It just boils down to the fact that I've been very busy, while at the same time too lazy/tired to write anything funny. I hope that I'll have more time and/or ambition in the coming months, but I make no promises. Why can't I make promises, you ask? Well, my friends, we are standing on the verge of the Trifecta. Some call it the Triple Crown, others the Triumvirate, and still others call it the Triforce, and while it often feels as though one must go through a legendary journey to save Princess Zelda, it's really not nearly as much fun to pick up and throw chickens in real life (they scare me and might peck my eyes out), so, to me, it is not the Triforce.
The Trifecta! The Trifecta is the three pronged, roughly 38 day period in which the most important holidays of the year are jammed. It feeds off your money, your will, your patience, your rest, and your pants (how else do you explain them getting tighter?). Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Eve are the three witches that taunted Macbeth and turned him homicidal. Cautionary tale my friends, cautionary tale. On a personal, non-homicidal note, fate has decided to add an aspect to this season for me. My birthday is New Year's Day. Perhaps I'm the chosen one, or maybe just lucky, or maybe I'm the antichrist. I can't say for certain. Although, if I'm the antichrist, I am really disappointed in A LOT of things and I'm pretty sure that there's nothing to worry about in that whole prophecy thing. Suffice it to say that I get a lot of combo gifts, which shall bring forth the wrath of the antichrist (just kidding!), but I'm going to save the angst for another post and today I'm going to stay with the topic of Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving. A beautiful concept and a nice way to kick everything off. Nothing says "I'm ready to end this year on a high note and be thankful for the bounty that life has bestowed upon me" like a food coma induced by eating your weight in carbs (I heart carbs). It is also the holiday that showcases one of the less popular Peanuts cartoons. Enjoyable, and yet it's as though Charles Schultz felt bad for Peppermint Patty's repressed lesbianism and decided to throw her a bone, as it were. (Anyone else feel uncomfortable when she talks about her crush on "Chuck"? AW-kward) I would surmise that, at least for me, Thanksgiving is also the time of year that reopens the long abandoned lines of communication between family members. I don't know about you, but I speak with some of my relatives twice a year, Christmas and Thanksgiving. Yeah, it's sad. It's just hard to talk to them at all. My family does not needle or pick at people (ha! at least not when you're more than 200 miles away and can't hear them), nor does our distance make our hearts grow fonder. We avoid. We are super good at it too. Now, not all of us are like this it's just a certain part of my family. It fills me with guilt that I don't speak to them often and then I remember that my phone has this amazing ability to receive in-coming calls. And so continues our war of attrition. This whole "I must speak to people who don't give a fig about what's going on in my life during any other point in the year" continues through until January 2nd. I'm dreading it. What do I talk about? It's not that I don't love them, I just don't know them and they don't know me. When I made peace with this I realized that those people are just my relatives. They're not really my family.
I have, for many years, spent Thanksgiving with my adopted family. People that I love and I know love me back. They're good cooks and even better people. They're family. We all have our family, whether it's the one that we were born with or the one we choose, or even a mixture of the two. It's actually nice to have one day out of the year when we all get together and just stuff ourselves and not worry about presents or the other hoopla. So this Thanksgiving, do your best to just enjoy who you're with and be thankful that you're not Peppermint Patty or worse yet, Marcie.
