Over the weekend, blog-buddy Karan asked some of us if we had any great ideas for homemade food gifts to give to family and friends for the holiday season. Quite honestly, we’ve neither given nor received much in the way of homemade food items, but when I ran across this tasty confection I knew right away that it was the PERFECT holiday food gift item for anyone! Here’s the recipe. (via The Friendly Atheist)
Your host, Mr. BKO
Greetings, friends. Thanksgiving can be one of the most stressful days of the year for many of us, so here are a few helpful tips from me to you to make your holiday a little less tense:
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It’s very important to have your menu worked out in advance to make meal preparation simple and efficient. Even though many of us enjoy trying new dishes and stretching our culinary imaginations the other 364 days of the year, the reality is that your family doesn’t want anything “unique” or “creative” for Thanksgiving, they just want the same old same old. It is okay, however, to experiment with one or two side dishes:
And remember to choose an appropriately sized turkey for your group. A thirty-pound turkey may look awfully impressive on the table, but your family of four will be eating leftovers for six months.
If you decide to deep-fry your turkey, please follow all safety precautions as directed by the manufacturer of your deep fryer. Most importantly, DO NOT attempt to deep fry your turkey indoors, as it is an extreme fire hazard.
As the day wears on, your family members may begin to get a little impatient waiting for the feast. Small children can be especially hard to keep entertained, so make sure they have plenty of toys and games to amuse themselves with:
The men in the group might be kept entertained by watching the traditional Thanksgiving Day football games. You can help them increase their enjoyment of the game by making explanatory cards that will help them understand the arcane rules and signals used by the officials:
After stuffing their faces full of dopamine-laden turkey and hyperglycemia-inducing carb-heavy side dishes, your family will probably collapse from exhaustion for a while, until time and digestion work their magic and start everyone scrambling for the bathroom. Be sure to stock up on high-fiber food like this:
Even the best cooks in the world sometimes have unexpected kitchen disasters, so in the event things go south in your kitchen, you can always give the Colonel a call.
I hope these tips prove to be useful to you, and wish you all a pleasant Thanksgiving!
It’s Thanksgiving Week here in these United States, and so begins the least productive six weeks of the year for those of us who are enslaved to Our Corporate Masters. From now through New Year’s, offices all across the country will begin a steady downshift as people take extra time off, streeeeetch out their lunch hours to go to the mall, spend even MORE time online looking for deals on eBay and Amazon, engage in extended water-cooler chatter over the umpteenth cranberry-nut bread brought in by someone in Accounts Receivable, and post naughty pictures from the company’s holiday booze cruise on their MySpace pages.
Meanwhile, for the poor, misbegotten souls who must earn their daily bread in the non-stop world of retail sales, things are only getting crazier. Since at least September, people all over the Internet have been posting pictures of and rants about the extra-early arrival of Christmas decorations in malls and department stores. Fearful of waiting for “Black Friday”, the day after Thanksgiving that they had already turned into a nightmare of shopping, only to find out that sales might be down, this year many large retailers starting with Wal-Mart itself and working on down began their seasonal discounting the day after Halloween. For retail workers, there is no such thing as time off during the last quarter of the year, no lazy days playing “Snowman Bowling” online, no bugging out of the office a couple of hours early to pick up some stocking stuffers.
So here’s my idea.
First and foremost, make it illegal for ANYONE to put up ANY Christmas-themed decoration a single day earlier than the day after Thanksgiving. And I mean not just the malls, but those people who have their Christmas lights on their house immediately after Halloween as well. Take down the pumpkins and witches, and go garland-free for three weeks, okay? It won’t kill ya. The Pilgrims were a dour lot and would not approve of 6-foot inflatable light-up turkeys, let alone animatronic Jesus displays. I practically shouted out with glee when I saw this photo of a sign at a Nordstrom’s — it’s only too bad that the one they’re building near me won’t be open for Christmas so I could give them ALL of my business this holiday season.
Second, let’s just own up to the reality of the situation and declare the entire period from Thanksgiving Day to New Year’s Day one giant national holiday. But instead of letting all the corporate cubicle cattle loaf off for six solid weeks, here’s what we should do: every office worker in America should be required to do two weeks of work in a retail job, and all the retail workers can spend two weeks answering phones, filling out TPS reports, and hoarding office supplies. Sort of like an extended version of the traditional British holiday of Boxing Day. And everybody gets four weeks off. If it’s all staggered out correctly, nothing has to close, everyone gets their holiday time, and corporate and retail workers alike get a taste of each other’s misery.
Now, clearly not everyone in this country is a corporate office worker or a retail employee, but maybe different sectors can work out similar exchanges — factory workers and fast food workers, or postal employees and DMV clerks — I’ll leave those details up to you.
Then, on January 2, everything reverts back to normal and we all stop bitching about it for the next 11 months.
Is it a deal?
Since the Halloween decorations are already in all the stores, and Labor Day is Monday, that must mean Christmas Shopping Season begins next week, right?
The approach of Christmas triggers an 80% increase in the amount of junk mail we get, especially in the form of mail-order catalogs. At one point a couple of years ago, we actually got a nasty-gram from our mail carrier telling us we’d better get a bigger mailbox OR ELSE. Fearing gun violence, we obliged, and now we have plenty of space for all the catalogs we get. Every single one of which goes directly into the trash…I mean recycling bin. I figure we are personally responsible for deforesting an area the size of Rhode Island every winter.
Enough is enough. It is possible to contact the Direct Marketing Association and have yourself taken off various mailing lists. Or you can sign up for the service offered by Green Dimes.com, who will monitor all the mailing lists to make sure you stay off of them AND will use the money you spend on purchasing their $15 “kit” to fund forest replanting efforts. Every kit is “worth” 10 trees. Thay may not quite reforest the entire surface of Rhode Island, but I hear they’re planning to just put down wall-to-wall carpeting across the entire state anyway.
Semi-famous blogger and Mutual Friend of Torrez Brittney Gilbert took this picture at a mall somewhere in the Nashville area this weekend.
I happened to see the exact same thing at a Yankee Candle store in a mall here in the Boston area on Saturday, along with a couple of other stores already decorated for Halloween. HALLOWEEN!!one!!eleven!
I’m sorry, August 11 is TOO FUCKING EARLY for Halloween decorations and merchandising. Plus, you do realize this means that the Christmas decorations will be going up in about a month, don’t you?
What can we do to counter this nonsense? I’m asking sincerely. The time has come where somebody has got to display a little common sense, and it’s obviously not going to be the retailers. How do we send the message to these people that they have gone completely off the tracks? Do we boycott? Do we write nasty letters? Do we post this stuff online and mercilessly mock them into taking it down? I am tired of just ranting about this; there has got to be a way to reinject some sense of perspective into this death spiral of endless hucksterism. Let’s figure it out and start doing something, please!
June 1st is National Donut Day!
If you don’t eat a dozen, you obviously hate America!
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