Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has for most of my life been my least favorite holiday.  In childhood it consisted of being polite at the table while old folks chatted and overfed themselves.  During my early marriage years it was having to try to keep a rambunctious set of boys and one tom-boy from tearing my parents house or my brothers house a part while everyone sat around and overfed themselves.  During those years it was usually capped by a family fight with my brother.  Having become thoroughly fed up with the whole concept I told my wife I simply was not going to do it again -- it was a hideous holiday and I just would not put my kids or myself through it again.  She talked me into giving it another shot and we would arrange for games and contests for the kids to play and forget the eating part.  So we did and that worked for a couple years.  Then something really fun came along -- my kids became old enough to hunt.  For about fifteen years, Thanksgiving became fun.  We owned a small parcel of land that we referred to as Cedar Ridge and one end of it we dubbed the deer slaying meadow.  That ridge was actually a kind of swale with fields on either side and a county road at one end and a meadow at the other.  In Indiana the deer population has grown so huge that the deer are like rabbits everywhere and they kept increasing the number of permits you could have.  So if my family staked out all the entrances and exits to that swale we could fill a freezer with venison so mild you could not tell the difference between it and beef -- and we filled the freezer on a regular basis.  But eventually that came to an end, we moved to Vermont which has a great number of virtues -- deer hunting is not among them, and the cost of non-resident deer licenses eventually took its toll and finally Cedar Ridge was sold.  And now, well we just kind of give lip-service to the holiday and eat a lot and get things done that we should have done before.  Life goes on, perhaps Thanksgiving will metamorphis again into a decent holiday -- I doubt it.