Thanksgiving Blogging Break

It’s time for a Thanksgiving blogging break. For the next week or so, I’ll have some new posts and some “encore” posts to share with you the blog reading public. Maybe one day this week I’ll not post at all.

Above is Gerald Ford extending a pardon to a turkey just like he extended one to Richard Nixon.

Thanks for reading Texas Liberal.  Please keep in touch and have a good Thanksgiving.

You Can Spend Thanksgiving Anyway You Choose

 

(Blogger’s note–This is a post I made last year. I’ll be running a few repeat posts this week as part of my Thanksgiving blogging break.)

Thanksgiving is coming up. It’s a day we are supposed to spend with family, eating a large meal and watching football. If that’s what you do, good for you. You’ll get no argument here. (Despite my dislike of football and the concussions and long-term disability suffered by football players.)

However, for many, Thanksgiving is a different holiday than the popular image of the day.

Some spend the day with friends instead of family. Some are alone. 

Maybe you don’t like your family or maybe your schedule or budget does not allow travel to where your family lives. Maybe you’re alone at this point in life.

Whatever Thanksgiving is for you, it’s your choice or your circumstance. Many popular notions and conceptions are as unrealistic as the menu above. How many people are serving pumpkin bread in the shape of a pumpkin? Or mashed turnips?

Each year my wife goes to see her family in Chicago for Thanksgiving. For scheduling reasons, I’m unable to go with her to Chicago or to my parents home in Cincinnati. Most years I’m fortunate enough to get an offer from a co-worker here in Houston for Thanksgiving dinner. I politely decline.

Instead, I drive down to Galveston and have a day at the ocean. I eat at some seafood house. It’s always packed and I’m always the only person there alone. I survive just fine. People are too busy stuffing themselves to notice I’m alone.

One year I did not go to Galveston. Instead, I went to the House Of Pies on Kirby Drive in Houston. I had just purchased all three volumes of Robert Remini’s life of Andrew Jackson. I had a lot of reading to do. I sat in that restaurant for maybe three hours reading about President Jackson. It was a wonderful day.

In the House Of Pies that day were gay couples and folks of all types. There were all sorts of people in, I’d wager, all sorts of personal situations.      

All good relationships between people have value. 

All people have value. 

Whatever Thanksgiving brings your way, make the best of it. Life is not like what is shown on TV commercials and TV shows. Life is what it is. Have a very good Thanksgiving.