Well, the holiday season is upon us, and you know what that means: for the next two months you're going to be forced to hang out with a bunch of losers who annoy the shit out of you. Or, as some people refer to them, your family. You're also going to have to get a crappy holiday mall job where you're going to run into people you went to high school with, who will then try to have a conversation with you like you two were best friends in high school when really they never so much as glanced at you. It does, however, bring us the most joyous of all the holidays: Thanksgiving.
There's a new piece of meat this Thanksgiving, fam.Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because there's little to no religious connotation attached to it, yet it holds a certain special place within all of us. It transcends race, ethnicity, religion, whether you're Team Edward or Team Jacob, etc. It's universal…well, unless you live outside of the United States. Or Canada. But they don't really count because, well, they're Canada.
I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a spiritual person, but I do believe in the power of food. Food brings people together like nothing else. I mean, think of a cake at a birthday party. Or a cake at a wedding. Or a cake at a graduation party. There's so many different flavors: chocolate, yellow, white, marble, confetti, red velvet. And the frosting! Cream cheese, butter cream, whipped. Wait, where was I? Great, now I want cake. Let me reread what I've written real quick…oh, Thanksgiving.
I'm okay with prejudices against women, Asians, and Lindsay Lohan, but I don't support prejudices against food. Every religion is different and I've studied each one in depth in an attempt to find one that perhaps spoke to me. I tried to be a Christian, but they believe in some guy named Jesus who was apparently the product of immaculate conception from some woman named Mary. I'm sorry, but really? Yeah, right, I've had a couple "immaculate conceptions." Or as they're called today, a drunken night at a frat house where you wake up in some guy's bed with no pants on and no memory of how you got there and you can't work up the nerve to tell your father that you banged some dude and are now carrying his bastard child.
Then I tried to be Catholic, which is a lot like being Christian, except you have to confess your sins to a priest. And it has to be a priest, not your local bartender, as I found out. And then in like, April or May or maybe September, they have this thing where you have to give up something for 40 days. And you can't eat meat on Fridays, but you're allowed to eat fish. I don't care what those assholes say, FISH IS MEAT. Catholics are hypocrites…there, I said it. First person in history to do that, I know.
After that, I decided to see what Judaism was about. What I like about the Jews is that they don't believe in a hell, they have one day a year in which you're completely absolved of your sins (as opposed to the Catholics and their confession), and they're really into bagels and cream cheese. Okay, mostly it was the bagel/cream cheese thing. However, the Jews have a lot of dietary restrictions: you can't eat certain parts of an animal, and, most importantly, you can't eat meat and dairy together. That's just not something I can get behind. Don't get me wrong, I'm okay with prejudices against women, Asians, and Lindsay Lohan, but I don't support prejudices against food. If I want a bacon milkshake, I'm going to have a bacon milkshake.
From there I just decided to give up religion altogether. Not because I had grown disenchanted, but because I couldn't think of any other religions. My head is already too full of other things that I'm not willing to get rid of to make room for new information (such as every line from the 1997 film Spice World).
What I do know is that every religion has their own special holiday, but it's Thanksgiving that brings them all together. It's beautiful really. So as you're gathered around the dinner table this holiday season, shoving thousands upon thousands of calories into your foodhole, take a moment to appreciate the joy that a slaughtered bird has brought us all. Because Turkey isn't just a war-torn country somewhere over there in Eurasia, it's a symbol of togetherness.