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.
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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.