Just In Time! The Rules Of Thanksgiving

Another bit of Thanksgiving wisdom, courtesy of Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves. If this be (fair & balanced) generosity of spirit, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
THANKSGIVING RULES REVISED
by BRUCE McCALL

The Three Wise Men of Thanksgiving (Three men offering their holiday advice, ¹You don’t really want to deep-fry an entire turkey on a hot plate in a bitsy apartment. ²Nobody is forcing you to play touch football. ³There is no need to drink a lot of cranberry liqueur.’)

Copyright © 2003 The New Yorker

Post this document within ten feet of all liquor cabinets, TV sets, sofas, and any distant relations who are still sitting or standing upright.

Article XII of the 1663 Jamestown Convention has been amended as of this date to include the following:

1. Thanksgiving-dinner guests are no longer required to play Scrabble, Go Fish, or Monopoly with children under the age of ten. Withholding of liquor is coercion.

2. A shaker of Martinis no longer has official standing as Thanksgiving breakfast. Early risers: the Thanksgiving Day cocktail hour now begins only after you have arrived at the venue and parked your car, and never before sunrise.

3. You cannot decline the Kansas Riesling served with dinner out of professed adherence to the claim that “the official Thanksgiving mascot is the 101-proof Wild Turkey.” This is apocryphal.

4. The mandatory minimum number of guests related by blood to the host/hostess is increased to sixteen. Seating them on the sun porch, in the attic, or in the basement for the Thanksgiving meal is no longer permissible, nor is the requirement that they wear bags over their heads and/or name tags. Asking how they’re doing remains optional.

5. In-laws must now be accorded full human status. Their chairs must face the dinner table, and they must be offered a choice of dark or white meat.

6. Native American guests must now be offered bourbon, Scotch, gin, or other alcoholic beverages by name. They must not be described as “heap strong firewater.”

7. When you are handed a family scrapbook or photo album, you must keep such article in your possession for at least a hundred and twenty seconds before passing it to the next person. You may not ask if your hundred and twenty seconds are up.

8. Precocious children under twelve years of age may now be fitted with muzzles by a non-parent after the first hour.

9. Reminiscences that touch upon parental favoritism, unpaid personal loans, and arrests of blood relations’ children are discouraged.

10. You are entitled to ten naps per twelve-hour Thanksgiving Day period. Moments after 4 p.m., when time itself seems to have stopped, do not count as naps. Do not commence a nap when a blood relation older than you is addressing you directly.

11. You will be videotaped by your most moronic relation. Failing to coöperate by smiling / making funny faces / rushing the lens carries the penalty of spending next Thanksgiving at this relation’s home.

12. Vacating the premises before Thanksgiving dinner is served in order to “get a breath of fresh air,” “check the pressure in the tires,” or “watch for shooting stars” will now be considered a desertion of familial responsibilities, punishable by talking college football with an in-law for thirty minutes without the aid of an alcoholic beverage.

13. The host / hostess cannot depart the house, for any reason, until one hour after the last guest has left, been expelled, or vanished. (Check corners, crawl spaces, and under the dinner table before lights-out.)

Happy Thanksgiving! *

* “Happy Thanksgiving!” is meant only as an encouraging phrase and will not necessarily insure a result like the one depicted in the Norman Rockwell painting.

Copyright © 2003 The New Yorker