Thanksgiving Story

It was Wednesday night, Thanksgiving Eve. Nuria, my Costa Rican lady friend who is visiting me for two months, had gone to bed. I stayed up for a while longer, doing Spanish lessons. The urge for a bedtime snack overcame me, and I fixed a small plate of Ritz crackers with peanut butter and honey. After eating the crackers, I squirted honey into the jar of peanut butter and feasted on that for a while. I love peanut butter and I love honey, so what could be better than both together?

Finally I decided it was my bedtime, too, and I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I grabbed a toothbrush and began brushing, but I immediately recognized that the toothbrush was much more "bendy" tonight than usual. I took it out of my mouth and looked at it. It was Nuria's toothbrush. Oops.

I rinsed it and put it back in the toothbrush holder, and then I retrieved my own toothbrush and finished brushing my teeth. I went to bed, but I did the right thing and I confessed to Nuria that I had accidentally used her toothbrush. She was okay with it; she even laughed about it. 

The next morning, after Nuria had brushed her teeth, she came back into the bedroom and told me that her toothbrush "tasted like peanut butter." We both laughed, and I got a great idea for a new invention: peanut butter flavored toothpaste. Why not? You can brush your teeth with it, or you can spread it on Ritz crackers and eat it. You can even do both.

Today is Thanksgiving Day in America. Down in Costa Rica, they don't celebrate Thanksgiving. It's an American holiday. Nuria asked me how it began. I told her that Walmart created it in 1962. She wanted to know why Walmart created Thanksgiving, and I told her they did it in order to have a reason for Black Friday. They wanted to have Black Friday to boost their sales, so they created a special Thursday to lead into Black Friday. It sounded to me like a good story, but Nuria was quite skeptical. I ended up telling her the real story (as real as history books will allow) about the Pilgrims and the Native Americans getting together for a feast and how all the men got drunk and ended up lying around while the women-folk cleaned up the Thanksgiving dishes. Kind of like today. As far as I know, that's the real Thanksgiving Story.