Why this Christian likes Thanksgiving way more than Christmas Disclaimer listed under About Me section and Facebook profile applies as always

Why I like Thanksgiving so much and find Christmas to be more of a pain in the butt.

The first of several reasons I love Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is the one unique holidays that is truly American. Everyone knows its origins date back to the Pilgrims and some of the original settlers of this great land Native Americans. So it essentially has its roots to all of the groups who were involved in the settling and creation of the American we have today. Not as well known is that people informally celebrated this holiday on a somewhat infrequent basis until a proclamation was made by President Lincoln in 1863 inviting people to join in a day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November. This started the yearly tradition we know today. I like this fact. President Lincoln is generally accepted by most historians to be one of the greatest leaders the United States has ever been blessed to have. In many ways Abe’s life and my own life have a lot of very frightening similarities and as such I feel a kinship with this great man. More on that some other time.

Thanksgiving has its roots in the celebration of a bountiful harvest from the fields. I have very close family ties to agriculture and therefore can easily identify with that. Even modern farmers are done or finishing up the harvest by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. This year being a BIG exception.

Least you be curious, due to the unseasonably wet year and warm year, combined with a very late planting season, the corn just ripened about two weeks ago, and the mud is preventing the heavy combines from getting into fields. Add in the fact that the corn is VERY wet, requiring it to be run through dryers before taken to market and its extremely slow going. From what I saw on my last visit home, I just hope they can get it off before the corn stalks deteriorate making harvest impossible. For any farmers out there, most of my farm friends say corn is averaging between 27%-29% moisture content and if anyone has hit 30% they aren’t saying. My uncle believes someone will see low 30’s at some point and just hopes it isn‘t him. For all you suburbanites and city slicks out there usually you prefer to have that number closer to 12%-15%. Anything more and you risk mold destroying the grain in storage, anything less and the grain will shatter as its handled. Also you might consider buying stock in natural gas or propane, no doubt its going to soon be in high demand as the seed dryers start burning it up in massive quantities !!!

Getting back on topic the main reason I love Thanksgiving so much is that it’s really just about enjoying four of my most favorite things in life: good friends, good food, good drink, and football. (Note I said football NOT good football, after all it always features the Detroit Lions and this year‘s star-struck itinerary also will highlight the blue chip Oakland Raiders. Ooohhh get the popcorn ready and the DVR tuned-up !!) People might accuse me of liking it so much because I don’t help cook. Be assured this isn’t my choice, it mainly has to do with my viewing of garlic as a major and essential food group instead of simply a spice or seasoning. But I am still allowed to fill the salt shakers and set the table so long as I’m highly supervised. But in all seriousness, I enjoy people coming over and helping out or hanging out around the kitchen as preparations are made. Laughing and joking, telling stories from the old year, speculating on the coming new one, catching up over a few drinks and appetizers. Dad started deep frying the turkey several years ago, and the guys will congregate on the back patio or garage like our forefathers gathered around a campfire talking, joking and all and all having a good time.

The food is amazing. Ten years ago, my parents discovered the Food Network and I’ve been delightfully entertained as my mother’s always excellent cooking grows in flavor and complexity. Mom has especially benefited as Dad has gotten much more involved in cooking and he isn’t half bad, in fact he pretty good and never afraid to try new things. Every Thanksgiving brings a new dish, or a new version of an old favorite, as they experiment with previously unknown spices and cooking methods. Granted on occasion Mom and Dad come up with some dish that makes me cry tears for the poor livestock and what they were turned into, as well as consider reporting this crime against humanity to the UN. Fortunately that is a very rare occurrence anymore. When it does happen, I simply pull-out some of the garlic bulbs I always carry, and mix in enough cloves to make it edible (usually only six or seven cloves is needed anymore).

There is none of this running around shopping, card sending, shopping, hiding what you bought while shopping, cooking, shopping, watching fifteen versions of a religious story by 3-year toddlers with no appreciation for the fine art of method acting, prepping the shotgun least a drunken fat man try and wedge himself into my chimney again, oh and did I mention all the shopping ? Yeah with Thanksgiving you have none of that. Its simply “Lets get together, give thanks for all of the blessings we have, and share some stories and jokes over food and games“. If that’s not the definition of a true holiday, prey tell what is ?

Even the US Army gets this and understands how important it is for soldiers to have a little holiday once in a while. Keep in mind, the US Army is an organization that often shows that the terms “military” and “intelligence” do not go hand in hand. I mean this is an organization that supposedly discourages homosexuality but every year celebrates its birthday by making soldiers eat cake while wearing berets !! But every year on Thanksgiving the Green Mother finds a way to get a hot turkey dinner to each of her soldiers. It is a point of pride for the Army dating back as far as WWII possibly longer, I‘m too lazy to research it. The stories of cooks hiking hot chow to far-flung, isolated positions that lack all modern comforts but have an abundance of enemy combatants are legendary. One of the bests comes from Colonel Hackworth while fighting in Korea, Google it or go to the History Channel website if you care to hear about it.

Honestly, I do not care much for Christmas and the reasons are many. Don’t get be wrong, as a Christian I recognize its importance and feel it is appropriate and fitting to bow our heads in respect for Christ‘s incarnation. However, the monster that we’ve created while doing so, resembles a chubby baby who has just woken up from a twelve hour nap. It wants to eat early, often, and in large quantities. It has no sense of responsibility in regards to the opening on the other end. I’ve always heard of the Christmas season getting longer and longer, but the fact really didn’t ring true with me until I saw a Christmas sales display at my local pharmacy. I initially thought was a joke being that it was the first week of October and even Halloween was too far off to be on my radar just yet. I asked the store manager about it, no joke was intended. Yeah, I always check my meds for signs of tampering when I go there anymore. Someone in their management team is obviously deranged and irrational !!!

Lets see, there are Christmas carols playing constantly and repeatedly over the radio and all the red banners and red decorations everywhere. In the days where I used to drink to great excess, and hard core benders that would make Charlie Sheen consider cutting back were far more common and intense this time of year. I’d often hallucinate and become convinced I was in a Soviet brain-washing/reeducation camp. More than once I confused a fat man in a Santa suit for Comrade Khrushchev carrying a Sputnik satellite to the launch site. This would set me on a rambling tangent about how Ronald Regan was going to kick his butt one day. I think one of my more memorable sayings was “Sure you might have more ICBMS than us, but being that more than half probably won’t make it out of the silo and half of the other half‘s ability to make it airborne is suspect at best, it will actually work to our advantage. Have you ever head of the term ‘secondary explosion’ my friend ? I encourage you to keep building them till Siberia looks like its been infested with giant gophers !!! BOOM, BOOM FATMAN BOOM, BOOM !!! ”.

Sure I like all the light displays, some of them are very nice. I fully intend to take my mother to the famous Columbus Zoo light display this year even. But some people get a tad carried away. Its good to be creative an all but my neighbor’s displays are so intricate and BRIGHT that my house plants think the extended day light hours mean its spring and start blooming as if they are a month behind on the deadline. I mean I have to wear a welding mask just to walk from my apartment to my car without being blinded. He doesn’t just get a thank you note from the electric company every year, they comp his yearly trip to Vegas. Recently they contacted ME to ask if I’d introduce my neighbor to the manager of my pharmacy. Sometime an airliner is going confuse his house for a navigation landing beacon and this will result in a wee bit of a traffic jam in the Westerville area. I’d hazard a guess it might even make the 11pm news.

People often laud about how fun it is to shop this time of year. For those of you who fall into that category, let me inform you of something. Black Friday is called that for two reasons. It is the time where stores cross over from the red into the black finically speaking, and because every year a few people are trampled to death. This usually happens to some poor store clerk by a rushing mob cramming into a Wal-Mart to buy a highly discounted TV usually made by some poor and disgruntled five year old in a god-forsaken, faraway country whose government doesn’t view civil rights as a pressing issue. I very unwittingly went with my parents one year and witnessed this spectacle of stress-driven mobs of people desperately searching for beanie babies and micro machines. By the time we were done, I felt like I’d just played a football double header, and was scared to take clothes off to take a shower for fear of what I’d find or what might fall out: perhaps a tooth, distended ankle, hyper-extended knee, or a rack of ribs ?

I resent the fact that during this time of year, shops are so crowded with aggressive shoppers I have to don a helmet and mouth guard just to make a run to the grocery or dime store. And when you get there, there’s fat Khrushchev among a horde of Ritalin sniffing six-year olds screaming and shrieking like they lost a finger playing with Sputnik. These kids tend to be in this super cooperative mood because of feeling the effects of sugar withdrawal and/or because mommy would only buy them two Tickle-Me Elmos instead of four.

People often stress out this time of year fretting about finding the perfect gifts to give. This is where having ADD is a benefit. I seldom have this problem. I wait till two days before, don my protective gear, then head to the nearest Meijer. In 45 minutes of focused walking, I’m done. If it truly is the thought that counts, a review of my past gifts will reveal the following thoughts: 1. I wasn’t 2. Dam I’m broke, and if I’ve actually thought things through sometimes 3. I might not like you that much and/or I’m an evil but very harmless genius.

I will now elaborate. I once gave my mother a frying pan (only thing that kept me from suffering serious bodily harm was the fact that I was 8 years old). Last year I won an air popcorn popper. I used it one time and discovered air poppers make popcorn which resembles packing material in both taste and consistency. Given that it was the first week of Dec when I made this discovery what was my first thought ? “Dam this popcorn popper generates crap. It will be a perfect gift for my future brother-in-law”. One side of the family does a $5 gift exchange and my mother long ago started bringing an additional gift to smooth over any hard feelings generated by recipient of my gift. Its ranged from the strange (fifteen pounds of long grain rice) to the bazaar (an entire case of Preparation H). Of that last gift one cousin was heard to say, “Its not the fact that he gave a case of hydroid cream that bothers me. it’s the fact that there is enough of a market for that product that they sell it in that large of a quantity and what hell-on-earth did Mike have visit to find it ?”. On that last thought, the funniest one I believe was a box of edible Christmas panties. Now we organize this gift exchange by numbering the gifts, and then drawing the numbers out of a hat. I assure you I had nothing to do with the organization or administration of this process. I surely would have influenced it differently if I had. Because the panties were selected by my cousin’s then girlfriend and now wife of nearly ten years. I didn’t know it was possible for a woman to blush so many different shades of red !!! One year I was contemplating how to deal with an unwelcome member of my entourage that I sort of had to tolerate since he was a friend of a very close friend of mine whom I‘ll call Bob. It wasn’t so much Bob I disliked (although I wasn’t too fond of him), it was his 5 year old kid. I only saw this kid stop moving, shouting, and screaming one time even only for a mere 2 minutes (he had run full speed, head first into a wall LITERALLY !!!). Like many people with ADD I am high strung and don’t have much tolerance for excessive noise. I don’t always deal well with these situations and it can put me into a panic attack. Excessively loud and constant noise has been known to transform my mood from happy go luck to very grouchy in two minutes. Especially when little Jr’s daddy never thinks he does anything wrong and acts as if its no big deal that his kid is screaming and running around the restaurant chasing other kids with a butter knife or gnawing on my remote control like a hungry dog gnaws on a steak bone. So after one especially eventful dinner that Bob’s future-ward-of-the-state had made more interesting that I cared for, it became apparent that something had to be done. Bob simply was not getting the hint. Now that says a LOT because I have the gift of being discretely-indiscrete when I want to. A real master of the back handed compliment if you will. So when Christmas time came around I held a small get together knowing full well Bob would invite himself along. As I was bidding my guests goodbye I surprised his kid with a gift so long as he promised to wait and open it Christmas day. The gift ? A small drum set complete with tambourine, a toy battery powered space gun, and ample batteries to keep it running till August. But I pushed it a bit too far by also including a four pack of Red Bull energy drink which Bob took offense to apparently. I found out through our mutual friend. Hell, I figured that was more healthy that the crack and pixey-stix I suspected Bob was giving him before coming to any social functions !! But Bob doesn’t come around anymore and when he does his remote-eating sidekick isn’t in tow. Wonder why ? Sorry about that Bob, didn’t mean to take the joke too far.

On a more serious note, as I’ve come to appreciate the diverse cultures and religions of our great Country, I understand how Christmas which at its heart is a Christian holiday can make those of different religions feel as if, our predominately Christian, society is forcing something down their throat that they don’t believe in. I’ve come to understand how my friends of the Jewish, Hindu, and various pagan faiths, understandably but wrongfully feel like only a marginal part of American society during this time of year. While I make no apologies for my beliefs in the Christian faith, if you are ridding in the biggest truck on the road, sometimes you don’t realize how much you are boxing in the compact in the next lane over. Its hard to defend Christianity as a religion of peace, love, and acceptance when things like Black Friday come around or a Santa shows up in the news for being too friendly with the children. Some of the more extreme fundamentalist use this occasion to bring attention to their extreme views. The kind of Christian fundamentalist out there harassing confused 13 year old girls outside abortion clinics, spewing hate filled rants about homosexuality ….. Those hate filled extremist that fail to realize Christ walked among and ate with tax collectors, prostitutes, and Gentiles. The lowest of the low in Jewish Society and he treated them with compassion, respect, and kindness. I see some of those knuckle heads on TV and regret not organizing a counter protest with the theme “We are also Christians and the idiots over there do NOT represent us !!!”.

Also the Lutheran church that I was born and raised in doesn’t see Christmas as the big deal corporate America makes it out to be. Sure we have a service or two but it pails in comparison to how we celebrate Easter. Trust me, I once served as the acolyte for the entire Easter season as well as for the entire Christmas season. I know we have two traditional services for Christmas but something like six for Easter (I don’t know for sure, I quit counting after four). Yes the Christmas story is important, but ultimately Christ’s visit to Earth would just be another hash mark in the time-line of human history had it not been for his death and resurrection on that tree in Calgary, which gave us the gift of eternal life. That is the ultimate gift of love and sacrifice. It is ultimately why Christmas has meaning.

To all my friends and readers I wish you a safe and happy holiday season. I hope you all get a chance to break bread with family and friends during this time. May the hope of joy and peace, which is the true spirit of the occasion, find you this year and the next one.

Redheaded Rambler signing off