Hey! My birthday is on Thanksgiving this year! So you can celebrate that!
Yay for me!
I’m in the same situation. Best of luck to you. 
I’m not brave enough to even suggest this as a joke! I treat my family like radiation: direct exposure only when aboslutely necessary, keep the dose small and limit the number of people around the “hot” zone.
Hey dear SIL,
Please let us know when Turkey day is, who’s house we should come to and what we should bring. Since you offered to host it, please fill in the details.
Love,
Anxious
I am a long time lurker who activated a guest membership just to say: I love Thanksgiving.
Christmas is so commercial, even Easter is commercialized these days. Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays I feel like we come together just to be with the people we love and expect nothing else. The members of my small family all live in different states, and when we come together for Thanksgiving our tradition is (since we are not religious, we do not pray) to go around the table and each take a turn at saying all of the things we have been thankful for in the past year.
We are not generally uber-emotional, and this is the one time a year I see my father cry and my mother say anything sincere and not dripping with defense sarcasm.
Try this at your gathering and all of the BS rants about pies and who cooked what will seem miniscule in comparison.
So there is your Pollyanna thought of the day, enjoy!
We Canadians already had our Thanksgiving, so there! No need to wait!
:: pause ::
Wait a minute. That means we don’t get any of the yummies you are discussing. Drat.
:: ponders marrying an American so as to get two Thanksgivings ::
You know, my grandmother’s name is actually Pollyanna. 
And my biggest worry at Thanksgiving is if I’ll lose radio reception before “Alice’s Restaurant” is over–or if I’m too far back in the buffet line to get a twice-baked-potato.
However, if I have to rant, I’m going to say I’m pissed off that my company is “officially closed” on Friday, and yet I still have to take a vacation day for it.
Cool, Cat. I’ll do just that!
Ponders marrying a Canadian so as to get national health insurance. 
I think you guys got the better deal.
I really don’t mind Thanksgiving- I think it’s a pretty good holiday.
-Guaranteed (at my company) two days off, so a nice 4-day weekend.
-Also, the Wednesday before is usually a “leave early” day.
-No expensive gifts to buy.
-Beer and wine generally flowing all day long.
-Football.
-Usually, the food’s pretty good, depending on which relative’s house we’re descending upon.
What’s not to like?
The Deacon, wife, and spawn aren’t coming to Mom’s house until Sunday, when I will be safely 50 miles away. Yippee! Another holiday rescued from hell! Deacon refers to my older brother. Not that I have issues or anything.
We have the same situation every year.
SIL: “I’m hosting Thanksgiving. I wanna do it. I wanna I wanna I wanna!”
Everyone Else: “Ok, you can host Thanksgiving”
Come Thanksgiving Day, and SIL and BIL are pissed off that everyone in the family is watching TV. Sorry, but:
- You two don’t like football.
- Everyone else in the family does like football.
- Football games are shown on Thanksgiving.
Now, if you have a problem with the fact that much of the family will be spending a portion of the day watching football, why is it that you insist on hosting every year?
I hate trying to lose weight and having Thanksgiving pop up just as I’m gaining steam. At least I am going to my aunt’s house this year, home of the Carrot-Raisin Salad and Marshmallow-y Sweet Potatoes, rather than my mom’s where she serves stuff I love that makes me want to pig out.
Mmm, bread stuffing and giblet gravy…maybe next year!
I curse myself for getting a job in retail. I get to go home sometime on Wednesday (they don’t know when I can get out of work, I am scheduled 9-5 but ‘might be able to leave early’) drive 2 hours, try and see my friends but still get sleep, then eat Thanksgiving, leave directly from there to be at work at 3:30 am. Maybe get a nap in. And I am scheduled to 7 pm but I probably won’t even get out of work then. Yay 15.5+ hour retail shift. If my parents wouldn’t kill me, I just would stay here instead of this logistical nightmare of a ‘vacation.’ I won’t even be able to actually enjoy Thanksgiving, because I have to worry about eating too much and making myself tired, and no beer or wine with my dinner.
I’ll probably have to purchse some No Doz for that shift.
And to y’all hitting up the sales this Friday - be patient! Our entire store (minus maybe 2 people) will have to be there starting at 3 - 4am - and other stores will be the same - we’re gonna be working our asses off with few breaks. This may very well end up being one of the most stressful and crappy days for us, so keep that in mind! People quit jobs like this before the day of or even halfway through the shift because they can’t take it.
Don’t bother. It’s twice as much work.
Unless you’re lucky, like me, and have a Canadian ‘family’ around who hosts Canadian Thanksgiving.
I have the opposite rant - given that I am having my damn Thanksgiving in Australia whether they have it here or not…this is a collection from the last three years…
Why don’t you people have canned pumpkin? And, since I must use fresh -which I have gotten used to, why are the pumpkins BLUE?
And further, butcher man, just order me the damn turkey. Yes, I want the biggest you have. A 3 kilo turkey is just a chicken with pretensions. Yes, I’m American. Duh. Do you mean my voice didn’t give me away? And BTW, yes, I want a fresh turkey. Yes, I know they are expensive. NO, NO, a 1000 times NO I do not want a frozen, self-basting turkey. I brine soak mine. I do not want salted meat which is what I will get if I brine soak a self basting turkey.
And to my Aussie friends, thank you for coming to my Thanksgiving dinner. Be aware, this is an actual holiday for me. I do have a culture, thank you. Watching TV does not mean you know what the holiday means to me, particularly as I am 7000 miles from home, where my family is. I have traditions. I don’t particularly care if you participate, but STFU if you’re not gonna. I love you guys the other 364 days of the year and I’m well aware you’re turning up mostly because you like my pumpkin pie and apple pie and pecan pie (and it’s pee-cahn, damnit, not PEE-can, that’s what you have in the boat) and my turkey, which is nothing at all like the turkey you usually get here, if you get it at all. My husband and my son are all the family I have here, along with you guys, so please, just bear with me one day a year, stop making fun of my traditions and my holiday, and eat the food I made you. I invited you because you were important to me, so quit it. I’m homesick. Really, really homesick.
OTOH, my friend who got on the internet and discovered all the fun stuff we do in Kindergarten, like make turkeys out of drawing around your fingers and Pilgrim hats out of cardboard, and brought all the stuff to do it and had us all sit around after dinner drinking wine and acting like children? I love you. I really do. (Um…this is supposed to be a rant, so…moving on!)
And further, yes, candied yams are a main dish, not dessert. No, you couldn’t crumb them, that’d be just weird. Yes, we eat sweet and savory together, no, I know you don’t usually. Eat it or not, don’t care. Leaves more for me. And thanks so much for helping me make it, husband of mine, but next time please pick out the pink marshmellows and use only the white ones. Pink marshmellows and orange yams are…um…well, it just looks very, very wrong. And somewhat disturbing.
And further, stupid me, I ordered French’s French Fried Onions from the American store in Melbourne, but did I order Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup for my green bean cassarole? No, no, I did not. This is when I discover that the Australian version of CCoMS differs WILDLY from what I know CCoMS to be. For starters, it should not be brown. This is just wrong. And I am homesick. 
And its going to be hot on Thanksgiving day, in the summer. That’s not a rant, that’s just something that hurts my brain. I think I’ll go to the US for Thanksgiving next year. Its the only time here doesn’t feel like home.
Sorry, that was all a bummer. Nevermind.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Cheers,
G
You do have my honest sympathy, along with everyone else working retail Friday. I promise not to do any shopping this weekend, and I will furthermore make every effort to do as much shopping as possible online throughout the holiday season.
Weird. All three of those items are currently on sale at the Waldbaum’s near my house (or actually, in the case of butter, were on sale last week - three pounds of butter for 5 bucks! I bought twelve pounds of butter).
I don’t drink, I don’t even get what’s going on in football AT ALL and I like my job better than I like my extended family on either side so there’s plenty for me not to like. Plus, Thanksgiving signals the beginning of expensive gifts to buy season. Bah, humbug.
Man, that’s a friend to hang on to! What an awesome person! Give 'em hug, or a high five or a beer with my name on it, 'kay? (I know this is s’possed to be a rant thread, but that actually made me go “aaawwwww!”)
For my rant: Jeebus, Mother! I offer to host Thanksgiving this year (as I finally have a place big enough - dining room bigger than yours, in fact!) and you say no. Then, just like every year, you insist I drive two hours to YOUR house at 6:00 AM, spastic toddler, sullen teenager and grumpy husband in tow, to cook a meal in YOUR kitchen and clean YOUR bathroom and vacuum YOUR rugs and set YOUR table and then clean up YOUR kitchen and YOUR dishes when YOUR Thanksgiving is over. And then drive two hours home.
I am SO doing Easter in my own place, even if no one comes.
You are welcome to come to my house next year in LA. It may be warm though. Forecast for Thursday is 71F.