Giving Thanks

Welcome, thankful reader, as once again it's been the US holiday which ends Halloween and which holds back Christmas. This year it's been less successful than usual at the latter, but hey; it's still one of the only times this place genuinely quietens down and feels like everyone's having a rest.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what Thanksgiving is all about. It seems like it's really just about eating, and as ever we tried to do our bit. Thanksgiving is basically turkey and mashed potato, plus a variety of frankly vomit-inducing side-dishes: this year we skipped the sweet potato casserole topped with marshmallows, and instead just went with the creamed corn (corn fried in bacon fat), the green bean casserole, the quart of sprouts and bacon, and the quart of stuffing. It all looked like this:

Now the thing about a quart of anything is... it's quite a lot. So a quart of stuffing means we're probably eating stuffing for most of December. Stuffing here is not like stuffing in the UK, either - it's basically bread, with a few bits of sausage in it. It's not Paxo.

The second traditional part of Thanksgiving is watching football on the telly in the afternoon. We dutifully did this too, and as ever it all got a bit boring by the 4th quarter, but there was some kind of tie break thing that went on this year. Now this is weird, because it's basically sudden death: whoever scores first wins. Given that the team that starts with possession is the one most likely to score, and that possession at the start of overtime is decided with a coin toss, this basically means the game goes on a coin toss.

Horror of horrors, shops actually closed on Thanksgiving day this year: Target, Walmart et al were closed for the first time since the 1980s. I think this is mostly due to not having enough staff, and wanting to be ready for the Black Friday sales, but nonetheless I'm sure it's a nice idea. We did actually go shopping a little bit on Friday, and it wasn't too much of a panic out and about, although at least one shop has boarded itself up to protect from some threatened looting. Nice.

It's now 4 weeks until Christmas, and it seems it's just 3 weeks before everything shuts down. This wasn't really a working week here, and there's always a sense that not much happens work-wise after the middle of November. I guess that's something we should all be giving thanks for, although I don't think it's the purpose of the holiday; that remains somewhat shrouded in mystery, dear reader.