Thanksgiving Dinner

Thanksgiving is an excuse to spend time in the kitchen. It is just a meal. That's it. Not anything else. Christmas has food, but it has lots of other stuff as well. Meanwhile, the canon of "Christmas Dinner Menu" is not nearly as strict as Thanksgiving. If you don't serve certain essentials at Thanksgiving, you might as well not even call it Thanksgiving. It won't be accredited. Because there is a Thanksgiving accreditation board. Not everyone applies to have their Thanksgiving accredited, but you could if you wanted to. But only if you serve the essentials. The accreditation board is like the Santa myth (sorry P) for Thanksgiving, with puritans instead of fat jolly men. That's why the standards are so pure. Anything goes at Christmas, but you also get hustled. Not only that, you get hustled earlier and earlier every year. Thanksgiving is nice and basic. It is an ode to fundamental moral arithmetic: Labor = Fruit. You throw in a prayer to thank God that the premise still holds and that's it.

You have to spend time in the kitchen and you have to cover the basics. So what is the point of the Dean and Deluca catalog? The whole holiday is the tradition of the home cooked meal. So if you care enough about the tradition you cook a meal. And if you don't care that much for the tradition then why would you spend $520 (or $280 if you require only a "small feast"- terrible oxymoron) to celebrate it? Even with dinner prices rising an Arkansas Thanksgiving is still only an average $40.97. On the other hand, maybe the fact that someone has found a way to sell Thanksgiving for $520 is a sign of hope. Thanksgiving's slice of the holiday calendar has been withering for lack of commercial hustle.