Atlanta Started Writing...

I dropped my parents off at the airport this morning; they're heading off to Atlanta. I'm not exactly sure why they're going, but we do have family there. My father also mentioned going to some conference. It's all a big mystery-- I didn't find about it until two days ago.

So it is going to be me, my younger sister, my younger brother, and my grandfather at the Thanksgiving meal. We're probably going to have spaghetti (didn't Massasoit or Squanto teach the pilgrims how to make spaghetti?). I do not care all that much, because I found an article by Martha Brockenbrough on-line that gives me reason to care not for this tradition.

Now, she does lie to us at the outset of the article, but the part I'm interested in comes after the line: "So without further fibbing (I promise!), here's the truth about three widely heldThanksgiving myths." That just screams of honesty.

And then Martha tells us under Myth #2 that "George Washington declared a Thanksgiving in 1789 after the United States first established a government, but Thanksgiving didn't go national until the mid-19th century. This was largely the work of magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale, who conducted a letter-writing campaign calling for Thanksgiving to be declared a national holiday. President Lincoln [italics mine] responded, issuing a Thanksgiving proclamation that set aside the last Thursday in November of 1863 for gratitude.

In 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt [my italics again] touched off a two-year squabble when he moved the holiday to the third Thursday to give store owners a leg up on holiday shopping. Detractors dubbed the relocated holiday 'Franksgiving,' and in 1941 Congress finally made the fourth Thursday in November the official day. So, in truth, it took 320 years to make Thanksgiving stick."

Lincoln and Roosevelt's mandates are reason enough to be nothing more than apathetic about the Holiday. At least Washington let us choose when we wanted to be thankful. Roosevelt even had the sinister undertone of changing the holiday for shopping. Ugh.

But towards the end of the article I find the clincher of why Thanksgiving isn't such a big deal: "...Lincoln's Thanksgiving proclamation expressed thanks that the Civil War had not destroyed the country." Ha. I would be thankful too if the Civil War had not destroyed the country.

The only other thing that I want to mention on this state mandated holiday is that I shaved my grandfather's head.

Happy Franksgiving everyone.

Here He Is...

I finally have a blog. What better day than on the eve of obtaining "Let's Talk About Feelings"? Well, maybe May 16th would be a better day. Anyway, I would post some more stuff, but "The Simpsons" are almost on. So enough is enough is enough.