happy thanksgiving! I won't be celebrating as I am working 11-7 and my parents will be out of town. This holiday season is the first one where i just want it to be over. No silver lining I can see, except for that eventually January will come.

However I still wish for you and me a good day and may we remember all we truly have to be thankful for. I have been blessed with a wonderful family and some wonderful holidays with them and I'm sure there will be special times in the future. Sometimes you don't appreciate what you have until you don't have it and maybe this craptacular holiday season will help to put my values back in the right order. RIP to your grandfather, I'm glad you're keeping his memory alive.

happy thanksgiving, dude. well not the indigenous slaughter and genocide, but the actual eating, drinking, and sleeping. word.

happy thanksgiving, my friends! yes, yes, what it meant, what it means. i hear you. but for what its worth, may it reach you, be well! be full! be happy!

Happy thanksgiving, Nezua.

Or maybe happy fourth Thursday of November, with much food and drink!

I like the picture, although I'm alternating between thinking you look lonely, comfortable, or both.

This is a hauntingly poetic post, which I am thankful to have read today. Even though so much of what you've written here is personal, I can certainly relate to many things.

I also struggle with this holiday, but mostly because of the myths of its origin that are stuffed, like my grandmother's turkey, down the minds of our young people. Sometimes I feel like to participate is to be complicit in the lies.

i'm glad the ambivalence comes through. i was raised to think of the day so positively. come to educate myself and it takes on tinges of dread for a few reasons. i still dont know where i'm at with it. yeah, somewhere in there, in the middle. or at both ends of a continuum at once. a shape that repeats...

thank you. i hope you enjoy the day. :)

Beautiful. I wish the family ties and good eatin' happened every day of the year. Happy Thanksgiving.

"food, drink, and an attempt to be thankful for what is in my life. that i can do! why not. why not every day."

Happiness to you and the family and the readers every day. Salud.

A short story about the holiday. Thanksgiving in Puerto Rico is an adopted holiday {no Puerto Rican in Puerto Rico would ever pass up a holiday} and the adoption wasn't really complete until around the 1990s. They are still not so happy about the 4th of July here, but they lay back that day anyway.
For a long time {100 years} many of the residents of the colony thought the holiday was about San Skeeveengs {San Skivings} kind of a Nordic relative of Santa Claus, that other gringo holiday guy, but San Skeeveengs seemed to be the Patron Saint of gourmands, not regalos.
In fact, older persons on various occasions would ask me exactly what it was that Skeeveengs had done to make him so popular in the US. The confusion about the holiday was not universal, but it was pretty widespread.
Of course the real story of Thanksgiving is pretty bizarro too, so explaining the whole thing wasn't fun.
The holiday has been adapted to realities in PR. The most popular meal for today is the Pavochon, the Turkey {Pavo} slow roasted on a spit over charcoal outside with Pork {Lechon} flavoring to make it taste like, well, pork! Over the last 15 years this process has been perfected but I am not sure why they don't just eat the pork and skip the turkey, but it's the tradition we now observe, so I guess there's no changing that.

You guys make turkey that tastes like pork?

AWESOME!!

Well RC, we never pass up the chance to eat, and you know that we are not big turkey eaters, except today (and who an pass up and excuse for a four day weekend). As for the "lechon", well I could eat that all year round, but I doubt I would survive a year doing that. Besides we are the only place on Earth where Xmas last for nearly two months! From tomorrow (black Friday, and let me tell you it is a dark day indeed) to late January. One thing I always liked about "las Navidades" in Puerto Rico is that is green, and not merely on the Xmas tree, but everywhere. The holidays up north felt so cold, so lonely, so dead. I mean I can appreciate the beauty of snow and all, but three or four months of it....oh and we do fireworks on New Years to!

Oh, and the day of the discovery of Puerto Rico was this Monday (last?). Good for us, not so good for those who where here before. If we ever get rid of that stupid kneeling lamb as a national symbol I would suggest that we adopt the Phoenix. Yes I know its Greco-Egyptian, but we borrowed everything else in this "New World" of ours why not borrow something that has universal meaning for a change.

yay for the Puerto Rican food stories.

oh and Mary Alice is Malicia's nicer alter-ego :)

that's perfectly understandable.

Quick access to high speed giving me a chance to catch up - and to wish you a happy Thanksgiving belatedly, Nezua. Yes, a Grandpa day. Missing mine too, celebrating him too.

Rafa, if I am not mistaken, Christmas lasts exactly from the late afternoon of the Day Before Thanksgiving {a social Wednesday instead of Viernes Social} and goes non-stop right until Valentine's day. It seems every weekend in January is a three day weekend {Wiken in Boriqua}. We have two Columbus days here {Raza and Descubremiento} and two Christmases {Dec. 25 and Three Kings, Jan. 6}, there are just so many holidays that we have to recycle some.
If December-January doesn't have enough holidays for you, there are plenty in July, too.
And yes, Pete, the Turkey known as Pavochon really does taste like pork, it is flavored with pork fat and other parts to get the taste, and/or cooked over the spit along with it to suck up the aroma.
I personally never eat pork or pavochon, but I like the aroma of roasting pork.
I do eat the regular version of turkey.