Holiday Report - Thanksgiving

I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Hopefully you got stuck at a relative's house after a really long, exhausting drive, then got to eat tons of overcooked, dry turkey and listen to your cousins fights over whether Obama is actually from Kenya. My Thanksgiving was WAY better than that, mostly because we had it at home and nobody came over.

That's not entirely accurate, actually. My daughter did have a friend over, so I shared my dry-ass Thanksgiving turkey with two giggling, insipid sixteen-year-old twits. Then, after dinner, this little girl used my bathroom and clogged the crapper. The damned kid must live on a diet of roofing tar and two-part epoxy, because it took thirty minutes to plunge that Godzilla-movie monster out of the plumbing so I could enjoy my after-dinner constitutional.

That's not all we did, of course. I did the shopping for the meal, so I had canned vegetables, a pre-smoked turkey and stuffing from a box. My wife, who is something of a gourmet chef, was not about to let a meal this big get away from her, especially because it was my son's last Thanksgiving as a dependent. So she made some creamed corn and cranberry compote that were both better than anything else we had to eat.

Then we played Borderlands 2. We did that a lot, because once the girls went to hide in the bedroom, listen to crappy teeny tripe on the radio and talk about boys, we didn't have much better to do. Sure, we had stuff we could have done, but nothing better than Borderlands 2. We won the game and everything. Turns out when we both have the day off and the turkey takes twenty minutes to get warm, we have plenty of time. More than usual, at least.

The best part about Thanksgiving, though, is the timing. Everybody gets Thursday off, unless they work at Denny's or some crap-sniffing retailer who opens at 8:00 for Black Friday deals on whatever-color Thursday. So you don't just get the day, you get a whole four-day weekend. As I write this, I'm not even half-way through my holiday weekend. I finished painting all my Mice & Mystics minis Wednesday night, and I've already got a date to play it this evening. We're going to cram some Zombicide in there before the weekend is over, and my best friend is supposed to come over tomorrow and bring some kick-ass new minis that I can spend three weeks painting before we play a forty-minute skirmish.

Thanksgiving is easily my favorite holiday. No religious baggage, no commercial promotions, just family and food and four days off. I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday as much as I did, because I've got bad news - Christmas season starts to today, and that is, as the man says in the song, the most miserable time of the year.