Planning Thanksgiving

ledelstein2
5 days ago
3 min read

I like Thanksgiving. Once you get past slaughtering the Native Americans, it’s a great holiday, particularly because it doesn’t include religion or gifts. That alone makes it a superb day. Add delicious food and it makes me want to go out and colonize other places and people so we can bring this marvelous holiday to them. It feels very American.

When I was a kid, my father’s family would come over for the entire day. He cooked – at least 2 main courses in addition to turkey so people got special dishes. It was a big deal because he didn’t get to entertain his whole family very often. I was the designated taster! If you have never been a designated taster, you must try it sometime. I sat in the kitchen and tasted spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and everything else he prepared. It may have been one of the best jobs ever, better than my future job of catching papers as they flew from a Xerox machine.

While we digested the first round of food (think a snake swallowing a squirrel), the house full of people did exactly as they pleased. As you would expect, some snoozed, some watched the one TV in my parents' bedroom, and the rest of us, especially the kids, were encouraged to gamble. To be clear, my father does not come from a family of gamblers. They are upstanding, hardworking individuals and they all, every one of them, loved my father dearly and remember Thanksgiving fondly.

Back to gambling. We played a game we called PIGGY. My father provided pennies to all the players – this was back when pennies were a real thing. Although now I know that pennies were called pigs, and that might be the origin of the name of the game, I always believed it was called Piggy because it was a game of greed. A couple of years ago, I googled it to see if it was a real game or if the grown-ups created the rules and gave us all handfuls of pennies and said 'leave us alone' (or ‘gey gezunt’ ‘go in health’ – same thing).

It is a real game, and this post is up before Thanksgiving so you can introduce your family to gambling. Here's the game as described by Wikipedia, bless their souls:

'Pig is a simple game first described by John Scarne in 1945. Players take turns to roll one die as many times as they wish, adding all roll results to a running total, BUT they lose their score if the die lands on the single dot.'

Pig is commonly used by math teachers to teach probability, and the rest of us understand it to be a game where the dominant decision is whether or not to jeopardize previous gains by rolling for potential greater gains – otherwise known as GREED. Somehow, a game of greed is the perfect companion to a holiday of over eating.

Happy holiday to you. On Thursday, I will give thanks to those old days with family, to the good ones I have now, and hope there will be more for which to be thankful next Thanksgiving, esp. around Nov 3, 2026