Thanksgiving is my favorite mainstream holiday. As soon as people can agree on a date for National Oral Sex Day (which obviously SHOULD be on June 9) that’ll be up there. But of the pillars that support Big Holiday in America (New Years, Valentine’s Day, Easter, 4th of July, Talk Like a Pirate Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Saturnalia), Thanksgiving is the best. No dicking around with costumes. No delicate social balancing acts around presents or dating or who killed Jeebus. No (or at least less) amateur hour bullshit with explosives.

No, Thanksgiving focuses on three central American traditions:
1. Making and eating delicious food;
2. Football; and
3. Fucking over Native Americans.

Two of those are worth celebrating, and the third needs acknowledgment.

Thanksgiving is also (for many of us) about family. I’m not going to spin some rosy sitcom Norman Rockwell picture here. A lot of times Thanksgiving Dinner is the Battleship Potemkin to the full Russian Revolution of Christmas.  But in my family, every effort is made to keep it holy until at least the first pie has been sliced.

Every damn soft article in the paper will tell you how you’re doing Thanksgiving wrong, or give you “great ideas to put a new twist on tradition.” Fuck that. Fuck that with a giant rusty steel strap-on. This is the year to go all-in on The Old Favorites.

Why? Because 2020 fucking blew. Last year we were stuck with Zoomsgiving, consisting of a ham steak, reconstituted dehydrated  potato flakes and a laptop at one end of the table showing the rest of my family trying to refrain from stabbing each other. We couldn’t talk to anyone because my nephew kept sticking his face in the camera and shouting.  Not that we had anything to talk about. “So, how are the four walls you’ve been staring at for the last seven months?” “Oh, fine. We put up a ‘Hang in There, Kitty!’ poster on one of them for a laugh. Also, the kids have begun scrawling occult runic script on the dog.” “Cool. We got an Instapot.” Jesus fuck, it was the social equivalent of the Sad Christmas Tree from Charlie Brown.

So anyway. This year will be different. This year is for recalibration and resetting the baseline. This year is about turkey and real ham and stuffing that knows a bird in the biblical sense. It’s about football. And it’s about burying your idiot brother-in-law before the ground gets too hard.

NFL NEWS:
*Black Monday is the day after the regular season ends, when between 20 and 33% of teams will fire their head coach. Black Friday is an orgy of American consumerism taking place the day after Thanksgiving. Both have been creeping earlier and earlier despite their clearly set dates, and now WORLDS COLLIDE as coaches start falling on or about Thanksgiving. After being ceremonially pants’d on National Television last night, the Giants decided to fire Jason Garrett.

Sure, it’s easy to blame our favorite Princetonian since Woodrow Wilson for the Giants’ woes- 215 total yards, zero sign of life despite an offseason premised on giving Daniel Jones the weapons to succeed and Saquan Barkley the support to…um…not be killed.

There’s no “but” there. It’s not just easy to blame Garrett, it’s correct and fun.

The real issue is whether this bought Joe Judge the rest of the season or just a few more games (Dallas the week before Christmas?) before joining the towering scrap pile of Failed Patriots Assistants.

*Similarly, there is a strong rumor that the Bears are going to break tradition and fire Matt Nagy on Friday, presumably after handing the Lions their first win. The Bears have not fired a coach midseason in 101 years, about the time Virginia McCaskey got her driver’s license. Nagy has denied these reports, responding “Forty three yards. Forty three. Important number. Prime number. One goes into the House of 43 forty three times but always comes out One. Doink doink double doink.”

It’s easy to forget that Nagy had a great first year, winning the NFC North. Then the Double Doink broke him. Unhinged. Brainsick. Disturbed the Balance of His Humours, in the Victorian sense. For the Bears fans in the crowd:

Nagy shitcanned poor Cody Parkey, brought in anyone with two functional legs for a training camp competition and developed a Howard Hughesian fixation on 43 yard field goals.  It’s all pretty much been downhill from there.

Not that I think Nagy was the Unconquerable Offensive Genius he was hyped as coming out of KC- he combined the standard Andy Reid West Coast concept with heavy Run Pass Option use. As the league learned to defend the RPO and his trick plays became played out, he never really adapted.

But for the sake of The Narrative, I’m going with “the goalpost broke his brain.”

LESSER SPORTS:
The Bulls don’t suck? That’s…weird.  Also, JV football continues somehow.

OBSCURE MOVIE TIP: The Last Starfighter!

Two parts Star Wars, one part Tron and a huge first step in CGI, I have sung the praises of The Last Starfighter before. It’s weird: we may finally be getting the Long Anticipated Sequel but it is more a passion project than the inevitable result of an Existing IP Mad Hollywood seizing on a childhood movie to capitalize on nostalgia-drunk Xers and Millenials. So that’s nice.

Video games save the Universe! Lance Guest! Robert Preston! Catherine Elizabeth Stewart! And Dan O’Herlihy as Mitch McConnell!

Go see it!