Thanksgiving

Greg Cook journeyed to Plymouth today for the annual pre-Thanksgiving parade (he took the above photo and posts more).

Thanksgiving at Hyde Park Avenue and West Street, Hyde Park.

Sure, there's already a Santa putting people on his knee at the South Shore Plaza, but some people still remember Thanksgiving comes first: Read more

We took a break from our usual Shaw's/Roche Bros. shopping routine today and went down to the Super-Mega-Humongo Stop & Shop in Dedham to take advantage of the 5% one-time discount you get when you sign your life away to Stop & Shop so they can data-mine your purchases to hell and back and bombard you with endless promotions (i.e., you register your new 'n' improved see-through Stop & Shop card).

They have so much room at this Colossus of a store that the deli department was able to devote an entire display case to a Thanksgiving diorama featuring two Pilgrim dolls giving thanks for nature's bounty, in the form of cold cuts, cheeses, olives and pumpkins. Don't worry, a few aisles away, they had a complete selection of Halloween candy.

Not the best cell-phone photo I've ever taken, but you get the idea:

What some Boston bloggers are thankful for today (most are thankful for more than one thing, so click on the links):

Jenny Frazier: Family and friends.

Angela: New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick for being so friggin awesome.

Red: That Don Zimmer charged Pedro Martinez and I was alive to see it happen.

NaturalBlog: Official Red Sox caskets, which you can get at the Magoun-Biggins Funeral Home in Abington, Mass.

Deb Geisler: My bluer-than-blue state, where men and women have choices about who they may formally bond to.

Amy Derjue: Not having to put up a $50,000 bond.

David Cutler: The hyperlink.

Steve Nadis's six-year-old: Martin Luther King and all that he had done.

Just Giblets: Having given up smoking.

Finally, we have Othniel77, who isn't thankful for anything today, because she refuses to acknowledge the holiday: I do not celebrate holidays that I find have no merit to the nature of my spirit or the spirit of those around me.

Thanksgiving done right: Hyde Park Avenue near West Street in Hyde Park today.

In case you're not too busy with your own Thanksgiving preparations, you can join Nika.

Michael Paulson asks some members of the local clergy: Why be thankful when times are tough?

Meredith O'Brien composes a Bingo card for a game the whole family can play on Thursday.

Some of you may recall how Jim Sullivan got fed up last year and started demanding action against stores and radio stations that get all Christmasy before Thanksgiving.

He's getting an earlier start on his campaign this year:

... Can you imagine how sour the pusses of some corporate execs would be if they received printed-out copies of blogs that say "Thanksgiving Comes First"? What if all of us called or wrote some radio station, telling the programming director that we decided to stop listening? If we all wrote a "letter to the editor" at our local papers, we could definitely expect some to be printed. ...

Seth Gitell discovered somebody yesterday with something to really be thankful for - right in his Roslindale backyard.

Sushiesque is promising live as it happens reports from the creation of a vegetarian turducken, whose name sounds sort of like an old-English four-letter verb.

Just in case, Spatch posts the lyrics.

Nancy just returned from an expedition to Roche Bros. in West Roxbury (ay carumba: No candied yams!) and reports the sheer insanity of the sort that only people who have survived getting in and out of the parking lot there can really understand:

It was like being in a training video! You're backing out, and there's one person behind you, and another person coming the other way, and then a pedestrian comes out of nowhere - and then somebody else starts backing out. . ... Somebody's trying to make a big swing into your space, so now they're on your side of the road and you have to go around them. You have to swivel your head constantly. And then, of course, there's always some joker parked in the no-parking zone right in front of the entrance to the store, today it was a Brink's truck, and so you have to go around them and hope nobody's coming the other way and there aren't any pedestrians coming into the crosswalk, because they never look.

Lily von Schtoop reports she gets
her turkeys at Diemand Farm
in Wendell and says they're
well worth the 160-mile trip.

It's a cornucopia of Thanksgiving thoughts:

Mini will give thanks that her mother and dog were not at home when burglars broke into their house on Monday - and that their loud car and the dog barking apparently scared the robbers away when they came back from an errand.

Ian makes pies. The staff of the Somerville Journal buys theirs. Michelle makes cranberry sauce with dried cherries and mashed sweet potatoes with caramelized apples. Miss Diana makes stuffed peppers (filled with quinoa instead of meat). Kate makes way more stuff than you. Gnomi makes far less stuff than you. Eeka explains how to make a vegetarian-inclusive Thanksgiving Read more

Leave it to these folks, who go all out for every major holiday, to show which holiday is next on the calendar.

Earlier:
Thanksgiving Comes First.
Why so sad, giant inflatable doggy?

Jim Sullivan's campaign to put the thanks back in Thanksgiving, um, to hold off the Christmas stuff until, you know, the day after Thanksgiving, keeps attracting new backers. He says thanks.

You can blame FDR, who moved the holiday in response to business people who wanted a longer Christmas shopping season.

Jim Sullivan has nothing against Christmas - except for before Thanksgiving. He begins a list of the worst offenders and explains:

... I'm a Christian, so I have more than an annoyance factor at work here. I think that cheapening the holiday, by expanding it beyond reasonable bounds, does a world of disservice to my religion. It gives people a false view of it, by making it a greed-fest. However, if you aren’t a Christian, your take on matters is still important; maybe even more so than mine. If you're Jewish, for instance, I'm sure it makes you mad to see your religion's holy days buried beneath this overkill. If you're an atheist, it must truly make you seethe. Let it out. Tell the world that you've had enough.

Sarah: Is there anything better than being at work and hungover the day after Thanksgiving?

I got up at 6:50AM(the time I normally leave the house) and was out the door at 7:10AM. I still got here a half hour early (I LOVE holiday lack of traffic). ...

La Diabla: I AM THE ONLY ONE AT WORK TODAY:

I feel like I should be hammered and pantsless, because...well, shit, why waste this golden opportunity? EDIT: one of my coworkers just showed up. I have to go put my pants back on.

Tom wonders why he's even at work with his lazy supervisor and one random guy.

Mass. Marrier reports on a Thanksgiving tradition:

... Combatants this year included:

Cherry
Cherry Strawberry
Buttermilk
Sweet Potato
Pecan

You may notice that this does not include the Yankee dessert standards of apple and pumpkin. Some years, we include these also-runners, but this is largely a Southern event. For a lot of years, 15 to 20 of us have gathered to swap stories, to drink, to eat, and certainly to wait for the pies. ...

Jesse Legg posts photos from this morning's Gobble Gobble Gobble race in Somerville:

... I'm no runner, I just shivered in Davis Square as my wife ran for the second year in a row. It's an exciting race to watch and it traverses through many of Somerville's squares and thoroughfares. Cold, wind and rain didn't hold these runners back and they all turned out exceptional performances. Good job! ...