People are CRAZY

How anybody can consider going anywhere the day after Thanksgiving is something I really cannot comprehend. I can barely move; the only reason I'm leaving the house is because my elderly and arthritic cat has claw problems and has to go to the vet.

The aforementioned cat, Princess Amanda; she is some five years my junior and far more crotchety.

I'm not sure why I like the Thanksgiving holiday. I reject pretty much every bit of its mythology; it has a disturbing and shameful history, which I've been aware of for a pretty long time because I never went to a public elementary school and thus got out of the annual lie-fest. My family tends to have one conversation every year about how disturbing the friendly-Pilgrim-Indian myth is and then just not discuss it for the rest of the day.

We also tend to largely ignore the whole thanksgiving aspect, which sounds a bit stupid since the day is called Thanksgiving. However, it just isn't something I buy into. I dislike being forced to thank anyone for anything, and I happen to think that gratitude is a bit pointless without a target. I try to be thankful every day to the people who matter for the things that matter. The rest is circumstance, skill, or luck, and thankfulness seems awfully disingenuous in connection with those things.

I suppose I am thankful for these things: That my family has more than sufficient food, that we are all healthy and close enough together to gather and eat together several times a year, and that we have someplace to go. Not every family this year has those things or opportunities. My uncle told us at dinner about his neighbor's experience; this year, she went out to do some last-minute shopping and ran into a homeless woman and her two children. They had noplace to go; all the shelters are full. My uncle's friend took them home with her and made them dinner. If anything, I'm grateful that there are people in the world that are still trusting and generous enough to do that; it gives me more hope than anything else for this country. Most people are still fundamentally pretty decent; we all want essentially the same things and when we stop to think about it, we realize that and try to be decent to each other. It's what makes life worth living. The nice thing about Thanksgiving is that it is one of those times of year when people feel compelled to stop and think about it, realize what they have, realize that everyone really wants the same things, and stop acting like dicks long enough to be kind to each other.

Maybe if these culturally mandated expressions of generosity didn't exist, we'd be forced to behave ourselves more often on our own. That's one of the nice things about atheism - it frees you up to do just that without a religious calendar telling you when to be a decent human being. In the meantime, I suppose I'll take what I can get, but I have to say I love it when my family doesn't say grace. When you've spent an entire day preparing food, it's a bit infuriating to wait two minutes while everybody folds their hands and pretends that some higher power, as opposed to you, is responsible for it.