I can best express my true feelings about Thanksgiving through a story a family friend told me as a kid. It's about a family she knew who would stuff themselves on Thanksgiving, as we all do. When they couldn't possibly eat another bite, they'd push their plates aside and fall asleep at the dinner table, like they were a royal family whose wine had been poisoned by a usurper. They'd sleep, digest, then wake up and keep eating.

iStock/stevanovicigor
Plate placement is crucial. How else will you catch your sleep-puke?

That family represents the one thing that separates Thanksgiving from every other major American holiday. All year round, this family probably shames themselves for overeating the same way we all do, but for this one meal, they've tossed out all their anxieties and built a nap time and a Round Two into their Thanksgiving tradition. Their dinner table was a no-shame zone. They were going to recuperate and wake up intent on not having any leftovers and being the living embodiment of the words "I don't give a shit."

That's the ideal I want my Thanksgivings to live up to. Not so much the part where everybody festively recreates the Jonestown Massacre as A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving plays in the background, but the joy of family (however you define it) coming together and collectively deciding we're all going to be disgusting assholes for a bit. And then, because it's the first rule of Thanksgiving, we're never going to talk about the gluttonous atrocities we have committed this day. We're all aware that what we just did secured our spots in Hell. No need to bring it up.

Don't mistake me for an anti-consumerist hippie. I define myself by the garbage I buy. The 55-inch OLED 4K TV in my living room is the only proof I offer when I tell people I'm better than them. They don't believe it until I fry their retinas with the glorious glow emanating partially from the television, but mostly from my shimmering aura of excellence. One day, I'm going to skip over thousands of years of evolution and become the first person to evolve into a gaseous orb of higher consciousness -- the pure manifestation of our species' superiority -- and it will be because I bought a Ferrari. I'm all for rabid, mouth-foaming consumerism -- just not when it interrupts my late-November food coma.

iStock/jakkapan21
This is what you'll actually find in my living room.

That's why I wait. I know my staunch resistance to all things Black Friday will come crumbling down the second a friend tells me he legally obtained a PlayStation 4 by a means that on any other day would be called grand theft, but on this day is called a bargain. Rather than ruin this most precious of holidays, I hold off until late (Black) Friday to do my shopping. The mad rush is usually over, and contrary to what most would think, there are still plenty of deeply discounted products left that let me flip a loss to a win and further prove how much better I am.

I don't like it when my Thanksgivings are sullied. I hated that, on this day of togetherness, my family decided to get into the biggest screaming match we'd ever been in. So of course I made it worse by screaming "SHUT UP!" as violently as I could. In the moment, I thought the only way to bring everyone down from peak ugliness was to show them something much uglier. And technically, it worked. The argument ended ... but not the way I intended it to. My aunt's wife threw her hands up in exasperation, walked out of the apartment, and didn't talk to us for an entire year.

A proportional response.

If our paths crossed in the parking lot, she would not make eye contact. Not a single word was exchanged. It was as if none of us existed to one another.

One year later, at our next Thanksgiving meal, she walked in through our door an hour before dinner with a huge loving smile on her face. Through her thick Cuban accent that could never quite work out the mechanics of the English language, she shouted, "AH-PPY SANKSGIBING!" We had no idea she was coming by. No one apologized. We still haven't talked about that fight. We didn't need to.

I told you all of that to illustrate an extremely corny point: Holidays have a weird power to rip your family to shreds, but they can just as easily bring you back together with little cause or reason or even action necessary on your part. Sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- the allure of sitting around a table with loved ones is enough to heal wounds.

The chemistry that occurs during baking mystifies me the way a magic trick blows this monkey's mind:

I knew I sucked at desserts, yet I wanted to make my own this year. Pies are too advanced a pastry for my primate brain to comprehend, so I made turkey-shaped sugar cookies. Sugar cookies are the remedial math class of desserts. There was no way I could mess them up.

Guess what happened next.

Explaining what went wrong would sound like a trailer park resident telling a reporter about the tornado that just passed through. There'd be a "It all happened to fast" and a "Before I knew it, everything was gone." Within a minute, the dough sloughed off the rimless cookie sheet onto the oven coils below, instantly catching fire. Rather than put out the flames, I punched a door. It was a moment of weakness, but I've lied to myself enough about it that I'm convinced I was trying to punch the door so hard that it would create a vacuum that smothered the flames.

With no other options, we sat down and ate. Everything sucked and the apartment smelled like a Keebler elf exploded. We made the best of it. It was still food, and it was still family. And if anyone was stupid enough to complain, I'd just point to the dent in the door. They got my message.

Luis is trying real hard to not punch any doors this Thanksgiving. Send him your emotional support on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook.

For more holiday survival tips check out Surviving Your Family Thanksgiving and 5 Thanksgiving Disasters You're Probably Not Prepared For.

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