Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving Day. I kind of knew about Thanksgiving Day before, but I never really understood how important it was to Americans. Lots of people I've spoken to said that they preferred thanksgiving to Christmas. At thanksgiving, you are supposed to sit around and eat and watch the TV. There's no faffing about having to give presents to people, and no one talks about the "true meaning of thanksgiving" because the true meaning of thanksgiving is to sit around and eat and watch TV. (Actually, the TV bit might be a more recent addition to the traditional thanksgiving.)

It seems to be a much more family-oriented thing than Christmas. On thanksgiving, one goes to be with one's family. This means that half the country tries to get to the house of the other half of the country. Which makes travel hell. There was an article on the news last night about queues at airports - and how airlines find it hard to deal with, because the people travelling are 'infrequent flyers' - they don't know what to do, where to go, and what not to take, so the queues take longer to process than normal. Roads are also hellish. Someone at work had a ticket to see the rolling stones play, on the other side of the city, and he thought that if he left 5 hours to get there, he might be OK.

Lots of people asked what we were doing for thanksgiving. We said that we didn't really know, 'cos we didn't know how to do it. I said it would be like trying to have a British Christmas, having read about it in a book. They said it was easy, you just sit around, eat, drink, and watch TV (ideally, you watch football on the TV, as in American football). I said we'd try, so we dutifully bought a Tofurky from Trader Joe's, and then realized that I don't know when we are supposed to eat it. Is it a lunchtime thing, like Christmas, or does one do it in the evening? I hope it's the evening, because it's 11 o'clock, and the Tofurky takes 1.5 hours to cook.

Also, we forgot to buy any potatoes, although we've some sweet potatoes in the fridge, so they'll have to do. (I don't know what Opa's going to think about sweet potatoes though. And he probably would have been disturbed by roast potatoes - he likes his potatoes boiled. And if you mash them, he gets upset.) There's probably a (in)convenience store open somewhere, where we can buy tinned (oops, have to say canned here) potatoes for some hideous sum of money.

Instead of worrying about all this, we're going to go to the beach. Well, S isn't, because she's got CSIs to watch, but everyone else is. I've been meaning to write abotu CSI. Maybe I'll do it now.