Kirstiecat | Blog

The Essential List of Thanksgiving Things:

#1 MUSIC

If I had to choose two perfect Thanksgiving albums, they would be Neil Young’s Harvest (yeah, I know he’s Canadian sigh and celebrates a Canadian Thanksgiving earlier in the year) and Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. Neil has always made me thankful and aware of the creative emotional energy in the world and the capacity for human understanding. Just think about the songs on Harvest-”Old Man” in which Neil Young as a 24 year old sees the common thing all humans need regardless of age (“someone to love them the whole day through”) and several points in the album I always get so choked up like when the strings come in during “A Man Needs A Maid” and when in the song, “Words (Between the Lines of Age)” Neil sings: “If I was a junkman selling you cars, Washing your windows and shining your stars, Thinking your mind was my own in a dream What would you wonder and how would it seem?” I am very thankful for Neil Young.

Alice’s Restautant, as with the case of Harvest, is an album I was raised on. It has a much different feel to it. It’s really a long anti war protest song of Arlo recounting his experience getting in trouble for littering and being rejected by the army because of this nefarious misdeed (poor Arlo even has to sit on the Group W bench with “father rapers”). Arlo ends the song by giving good advice for next time we’re in a similar situation: gather as many people as possible and start a movement. The Alice’s Restaurant Anti-Massacre Movement and all you’ve got to do is sing along when your part comes around on the guitar. Besides, if you don’t have Alice’s Restaurant, how are you gonna have a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat?

#2 FOOD or more specifically TOFURKEY

Tofurkey is a must for any vegetarian on Thanksgiving because you can be thankful without having to kill anything. I would even venture to say avid carnivores should try it. I brought it to a neighbor’s Thanksgiving party last year and it was gone pretty fast. Even my own dad, an avid carnivore, likes my tofurkey. The secret is in how you prepare it. You have to make a nice glaze for it, for example. My favorite choice for a glaze is a cherry mustard one that gets spread a top of the tofurkey and surrounding vegetables.

I don’t say too many nice things about myself but I will say I am a great cook. For Thanksgiving this year, I am making chestnut apple stuffing, nutmeg buttermilk mashed potatoes, black eyed pea salad, steamed green beans tossed with olive oil, a squeeze of lemon, and roasted pine nuts, and butternut squash soup planned. I go all out for Thanksgiving as my parents are visiting from NY.

#3 PIECES OF APRIL

Pieces of April is a really wonderful film taking place in NYC in which a girl who was never the favorite in her family struggles to cook a Thanksgiving meal and welcome her family to her place for perhaps the last possible time before her mother passes on. The acting is fantastic and it has it’s share of both funny and touching moments as she struggles to find a stove that works and as the residents in the apartment building she lives in as well as her own family really come together and share in the greatness of Thanksgiving. I hate to use the term “heart-warming” but it really is. And also it features the music of NYC based The Magnetic Fields. So there. I can call it heart warming if I want to!

#4 FAMILY

Last but not least, Thanksgiving is all about being thankful so it’s important to be thankful for both family and friends. If you don’t have any family near to you or you just happen to be a Charles Dickens character, do the next best thing and be thankful for your favorite record store god or goddess.

I’ll end this with some of my favorite family pictures. Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

(dad,cinchel,and I on the beach last spring)

(cinchel and my mom)

My father explains to the Parliament Cats in Ottawa about how corrupt the American Government is whilst they listen raptly.

(caption per my father’s request)

My mom at my apt. last spring.

Cinchel and I in Toronto at the end of last summer.

my mom and I as old black and white horror film stars-oh! oh! I’ll be the vampire bait!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 24th, 2005 at 10:02 am and is filed under rambles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.