Thanksgiving just keeps on getting closer. Are you losing your holiday spirit before the holidays have even really begun? Buck yourself up with a little black humor—the Thanksgiving ritual has been fertile ground for wags practically since Pilgrim days.
Day Five: Thanksgiving Satire
Do yourself a favor and read “Wild Turkey.” I nominate this essay, which appeared on the long-running blog Tomato Nation, as a nascent classic piece of Thanksgiving literature for our times. (Maybe I’m not the only one who feels that way—I have to confess I found it because it was the first hit when I Googled the phrase “best Thanksgiving blog post ever.” And now you know about my research methods…gulp.)
“Wild Turkey” is pure sweetness and light compared to William S. Burroughs’ “Thanksgiving Prayer,” recorded in 1986, first heard by me on CD as an 18-year-old in another kid’s dorm room, and now made easy to find thanks to the wonder of the interwebs.
Or you may enjoy Calvin Trillin’s 1981 essay about his (as yet unsuccessful) campaign to have turkey replaced by spaghetti carbonara as the Thanksgiving national dish. I feel a little bad about this, but all I can find is a pirated version, here. The real thing is in Trillin’s book Third Helpings.
And if nothing else works, dust off your mother’s LP of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Resturant—because as I observed a few posts back, holidays are about nothing if not tradition, and for some reason Arlo’s long, rambing tale about dodging the draft and getting picked up for littering on Thanksgiving was ever ours.
