Here’s progress: While the American Puritans are credited with getting the whole Thanksgiving thing rolling here in the New World, they lost control of the holiday soon after.
That was good news.
That meant that the holiday soon became focused on the feasting part of Thanksgiving rather than the fasting part. How football and cheap TVs worked into the whole equation is more complex than atom splitting at CERN.
I’m thankful I don’t have to understand it all myself, and there’s even more I’m thankful for this year that’s easier to wrap your head or bacon around:
• I’m thankful that I’m either still agile enough or stealth enough when I climb my 30-foot ladder to empty the roof gutters of leaves that none of my neighbors call 911 or my wife.
• I’m thankful I spend most of my waking hours in a community where no one notices that the lady bagging groceries is wearing a hijab.
• I’m thankful that I never grew out of being 9 years old and think most of everything is funny.
• I’m thankful that as exhausting as right-wing extremism is, I’m never too exhausted to just accept it.
• I’m thankful for friends who laugh at my jokes.
• I’m thankful Donald Trump apparently sleeps some of the time.
• I’m thankful I have the screechy cicada-like tinnitus and not the roaring, whooshing version.
• I’m thankful that I have found a way to live without plastic grocery bags after going through a period when I was seriously worried I might not make it.
• I’m thankful my family no longer cares that I refuse to serve turkey at Thanksgiving and do things to an animal carcass in the sink that would require confession or legal defense if they happened any other way.
• I’m thankful that Comcast officials will surely suffer from a virtual plague of ailments and unfortunate events after collecting the world’s worst karma for years.
• I’m thankful my addictions to extravagant foods, wines, brews and coffees don’t require me to shoot them up or hunt down a supplier who never takes off his coat.
• I’m thankful I can’t smell whatever is in my car that my wife and daughter can.
• I’m thankful that there are now more microbreweries and tap houses per capita in Colorado than anywhere else on our odd little planet. And this year, I’m especially thankful for Dry Dock’s Schwarzbier and eternally grateful for Left Hand Nitro Milk Stout.
• I’m thankful that police radar and body cams can’t read my thoughts as I imagine all the horrible things that happen to the ass-hats on Interstate 225 during rush hour every morning and every night.
• I’m thankful people in most of the world see Donald Trump as something forced upon us that we must suffer, rather than something we have forced upon the planet that everyone but us must suffer. As bad as he is for the world, he’s ever so much worse for us.
• I’m thankful that, unlike cheap bourbon whiskey, cheap Irish whiskey is totally drinkable.
• I’m thankful I neither say, understand nor must suffer, “the shoe is on the other foot.”
• I’m thankful that most of my friends and family members I see each year at Thanksgiving understand that the turkey dinner thing is actually a cruel practical joke played on Americans by early pioneers.
• I’m thankful for the scientific method, that I understand it and I stand behind it.
• I’m thankful that my tolerance for physical pain has increased proportionately with my advancing age.
• I’m thankful you actually can buy happiness, often from the remand bin in the back of the grocery store, and that I sometimes have enough money to prove that out.
• I’m thankful that I have perfected the ability to make it appear that I’m listening and enjoying someone blathering at me, or that I think I’ve perfected that skill and others are happy to not point out the opposite, or that I also have the ability to tune those complaints out, too.
• I’m thankful that bell bottoms, skinny jeans and jock-socks with stripes aren’t marketed or even legally sold to my age group.
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