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I’m thankful for…


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Here comes Thanksgiving again, my eighth favorite holiday. You know the drill. It’s the day, to quote the 1990s British band Blur, “To gather the family around the table/To eat enough to sleep.”

Thanksgiving is no one’s favorite holiday, though it’s in everyone’s top-three. The holiday is the Royal Rumble to Christmas’ WrestleMania – a delectable appetizer, but it’s too brief and the spectacle isn’t as grand. Does that make New Year’s the Survivor Series?

Food is the main component. Thanksgiving is the only occasion in which every oven rack, stovetop, crockpot and hot plate is in use. It’s like the feasts in Brian Jacques’ “Redwall” books I read as a kid, where the dude just lists food in a run-on sentence for three pages. The meal is lots of passing and dumping and clinking and chowing, featuring the one person who talks over everyone else about politics, weather and traffic.

Post-gorge, you feel like you ate a boulder or something and you wish the dishes could wash themselves like a Disney movie, but grapple with the consequences that it would be bad for the workforce. Next, for some reason, it’s time to watch the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys. Some people care about privatizing Social Security, some care about switching to a single-payer healthcare system, I care about breaking the monopoly those teams have on the third Thursday in November.

Finally, you become one with the couch with dreams of waking early to buy things. It’s called Black Friday because we’re mourning our dignity (I own the royalties on this joke now). Black Friday is my favorite spectator sport besides Publix on Sundays, which if you live in Green Cove Springs you don’t have to worry about. At least you got $15 off that ping pong table.

All joking aside, it’s a much-needed day of relaxation, communion and three weeks it’s nothing but leftovers. Here’s what I’m thankful for:

I’m thankful I was born in a country with a free press and for the readers of newspapers. To take that a step further, I’m thankful for informed readers who ingest information carefully before spouting off on social media.

I’m thankful I made most of my mistakes in this business at a student-run outlet. Right?

I’m thankful I’ve met so many different people and written so many fun, powerful or interesting stories.

I’m thankful John Winston Lennon and James Paul McCartney met July 6, 1957. The world is better for it. The same goes for Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek of the Doors and Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus of Blink-182. The latter is kind of a stretch.

I’m thankful for albums like My Bloody Valentine's “Loveless,” Queens of the Stone Age’s “Songs for the Deaf” and Pearl Jam’s “Vs.” for helping me write this. And coffee.

I’m thankful the people I’m spending Thanksgiving with this year don’t watch the NFL, so I don’t have to watch the Lions lose every year, per my family’s tradition. The Lions, who have played 78 Thanksgiving games, deserve a break. At least we do.

From Riverside to Fernandina Beach to Green Cove to Palatka to St. Augustine, I’m thankful for what this area has to offer. Not many regions balance the rural, urban and coastal communities as well as Northeast Florida.

I’m thankful for my parents and my sister, eight years younger than me, who is a freshman at the high school I went to. Very unsettling.

I’m thankful for the two great dogs I had: Dixie, 2000-2011, a perky golden retriever and Sura, 2012-2016, a droopy mastiff/Great Dane mix the size of a horse.

I’m thankful both sets of my grandparents are alive.

I’m thankful for my dad who served more than 20 years in the U.S. Air Force and my uncle David, a Vietnam veteran, who passed away in 2016 after a near-decade long battle with dementia.

I’m thankful my family says a prayer and we list off what we’re grateful for. With my more traditional grandparents, it’s a much longer version of that with the same sentiment. I won’t be with either of them this year, but I think there’s something exceptional about millions of people doing the same thing at once. Happy Turkey Day.