11/05/2025
Back by special request
The True Story of Thanksgiving
Brenda D. Minge
It is once again approaching Thanksgiving and that all too awkward time of sitting around the Thanksgiving table holding hands and half-heartedly giving thanks for blessings in our lives and praying the television would explode taking all the parades and Bowl Games with it.
Admit it; you sit there holding hands with someone you are most likely irritated with, or worse with a total stranger (who knows where their hands have been). As someone is starting the prayer, you are either kicking your husband whose head maybe bowed but is DEFINITELY still watching the game, or giving the dreaded “mother-look” to the kids whom are at a separate table and already flipping marshmallows from the candied yams at Uncle Bernie’s bald spot. It is going to be a LONG DAY, and an even longer night. I call it the Night of Eternal Dirty Dishes. For a full 24 hour period someone somewhere is continually eating something, drinking something, spilling something or feeding things to the dog that dogs cannot properly digest. And of course there are those wonderful individuals that take a bite of something, don’t like it and spit it into a napkin and HIDE the napkin. Which will begin to attract attention as it becomes one of the things the dog cannot properly digest.
Let us not forget (God only knows we have tried) those “special” family members that feel they don’t need to ask for permission to stay in your home, in your bed, eating all the food you bought for Thanksgiving dinner the day before. These are the same people who always forget to pack things but always just happen to find the perfect substitute in YOUR closet. And the fact that they are at least 35 lbs heavier and 2 dress sizes larger than you just doesn’t seem to matter to them. Nor does the fact that your jewelry and cologne belong to YOU, and all those toys and games you have bought for your children were not disassembled and broken before you arrived.
And the eternal joke “Don’t you let me leave without paying you for this.” But no one ever knows or can remember what “this” was. And God forbid you do say anything because they will dig what ever it maybe out of their bags slamming it down on the table (always managing to break/spill or mangle the item beyond recognition) only to scream “That is thanks I get for driving all this way to spend my few remaining years with my ungrateful family.” Please just stick a knife in my eye to distract me from smacking them right upside their pointed little heads.
And finally everyone has gone. You get up off your knees (having kissed the ground when they left) and swear next year the dinner will be at someone else’s home. HA !
There are times when it is appropriate to lie to your self. You collapse into your favorite chair, after digging the remains of one of the napkins and it unrecognizable contents out of the seat cushion. Your sweet innocent child comes to you laying his precious face in your lap saying “Mommy, what are these red itchy spots on my tummy?” Then you know you have had a successful holiday gathering.
