Since I will be off for the next couple of days for Thanksgiving I will make this my official Thanksgiving post. As a kid, I remember singing the ole tune "Thanksgiving is coming, the goose is getting fat, time to put a penny in the old man's hat, if you haven't got a penny a half penny will do if you haven't got a half penny then God bless you." However, I never understood what I was saying. Whenever I said half penny I thought of those pennies that were cut in half by the railroad tracks and I also thought the word goose was synonymous with turkey. Now that I think about it I didn't understand half of the things I said as kid. I had just heard others use it so I tried to use it the same way. Like the old Halloween song - "Skin and Bones". I don't think that as a 6 year old I could conceive of what bones really were. For instance I knew that Long Johns was something you wore but I had no idea what they were. I thought they were pajamas that were too long. Larger words didn't make sense either. I suppose it was ironic that I didn't know what the word "stupidity" meant. I knew stupid, but stupidity escaped me. I do remember grandma telling me it was a bad word and I wasn't to use it. Then when you hit high school and finally get all of those words down you have to learn a cornucopia of SAT words just to get into college and then you feel stupid again. Like ameliorate, insipid, exacerbate and mitigate. Words that I never use nowadays. Then when you are in college you are told to keep your writing on a 6^th grade level, and that's when you are like "Aha high school was just an exercise in futility". So what does all this have to do with Thanksgiving? Well, if it wasn't for Thanksgiving and the pilgrims landing on Plymouth rock then we wouldn't have turkey at thanksgiving, we'd have goose. Wait, I just researched it. They had geese and turkey, it was 1621, and my namesake John Alden, age 22 was there. For more info on Thanksgiving go to here . So what does all this have to do with Thanksgiving? I guess I am thankful I don't have to speak like a college professor. In reality I'm thankful for sooo much more, but it's fun to be thankful for insipid things as well.

Thought of the Day

Ralphie: "It was gone, all gone. no turkey legs, turkey ala king, no turkey sauce, turkey leftover, turkey sandwiches. Gone all gone."

-- A Christmas Story (paraphrased)