Nontraditional Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, as usual, we and a large number of people we presume we are related to in some manner celebrated by eating too much. We were not allowed the customary post-Thanksgiving recovery period, however; we were not even done eating yet when a Series of Events was announced by certain Young Persons in attendance.

We were given a choice of activities: We could participate in a bowling tournament in the family room, attend a fashion show in the living room, or patronize the child-run bakery downstairs. There was no fourth option, but I suspect that certain adults, in an effort to get in on some of that recovery period, climbed into one of the vans in the driveway for some shut-eye.

I signed up for the bowling tournament, envisioning those little plastic bowling sets with the pins that can be knocked down by an ant. Instead I was given a Wii controller and introduced to my character, a brunette with pigtails and glasses and hands, but no arms. (Sometime later we also discovered that none of the girl characters were, strictly speaking, wearing pants, whereas ALL of the male characters were fully clothed, even though they no more had actual legs than the females. We thought this highly unfair and lodged an official complaint, which was thrown out on a technicality.)

I won the preliminary round of bowling and moved on to the finals, which I also won despite no prior experience in bowling without the benefit of arms OR pants. My victory drew admiration, although it also caused my arm to throb for two days. Had I been interviewed about my win, the headline would have read: "Bowling champ injured while engaging in fake sport."

I later visited the downstairs bakery, run by two sisters, and a subsidiary store run by their younger brother. The girls graciously gave their brother a great deal of business by sending their own customers to him, but only after the customers had purchased something at the bakery and had consumed it. "When you're done with your cupcakes," they told us, "we don't have anything more to do with the food. You can take it to his store," pointing at the Tiny Male Relative. "He'll take care of it."

This prompted the Hero's later observation that, although the young male proprietor believed he was running a market, he was "actually the garbage man."

"But an elegant one," I noted. "The garbage was delivered to customers on silver platters."

So on Thanksgiving we filled up on fake food and hurt ourselves playing fake sports. What more can you ask for?