Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving. It's noon. Nuria and I are heating a frozen pizza for lunch. It's a beautiful sunny day and the temperature is 60°F. The normal auto traffic on my street is sparse, almost absent. People are in their homes or they've traveled somewhere else. 

I slept late and skipped breakfast. Soon, Nuria and I will be having lunch: pizza. The Walmart pizza is quite good, even though it starts out frozen. Afterward, my plans include chocolate chip cookies for dessert. 

Later, we'll have Thanksgiving dinner. As there are only two of us, Nuria is keeping it simple. We'll eat Smithfield hickory-smoked sliced ham with pineapple, walnut salad (apples with honey and walnuts and celery and mayo), sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, pumpkin pie, and velvet cake (with cream cheese icing). We'll drink a delicious bottle of alcohol-free champagne—also called  sparkling cider. I call it a simple dinner because I don't have to put it together. But if I were living alone, I'd just make a hamburger. Better yet, I might just drive to Burger King. Their What-a-Burgers are tastier than my homemade burgers.

The aforementioned red velvet cake really does look like red velvet before the icing is put on it. You can't buy red velvet cake at Burger King, so that would be a downside of eating there. I've got ground hamburger in the fridge, and two buns in the bread box, so we'll have home-cooked hamburgers for lunch tomorrow. And, probably, red velvet cake—for the remainder of the week. 

Everyone, I hope you enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday, and let's not forget why we celebrate the holiday. Thanksgiving  commemorates the colonial Pilgrims' harvest meal that they shared with Wampanoag Indians in 1621. The Wampanoag Indians had been key to the survival of the colonists during the first year they arrived in 1620. Over 400 years later, that harvest celebration is still going. Nuria informs me that in Costa Rica, the government has announced that the country will celebrate Thanksgiving beginning this year. Most Costa Ricans know nothing about the US holiday and don't know what a turkey is, so I suspect that in Costa Rica the holiday will be less about celebrating a successful harvest that happened 400 years ago, and more about eating yourself into a coma and getting falling-down drunk. Which is fine with me. To each his own.