My Thanksgiving Holiday By Amanda Murphy

This was a very fun Thanksgiving Holiday. I had a great time this Thanksgiving Holiday. I hope that all the Thanksgiving Holidays will be more like this one and also like the ones of the past. Thanksgiving Holiday is so so much fun. Thanks for Thanksgiving Holiday. I really liked it. It was really fun. Thanks for it. I hope it was fun. It was fun. I liked it. I liked it lots. I hope you liked it. My family had Thanksgiving Dinner. It was really really fun. It was so so good. I liked it a lot. We played lots of games too. That was really fun. I had fun. It was really really fun. We had fun. I hope you had fun too!

First, on Thanksgiving morning I made crescent rolls. I made three rolls of Pillsbury crescent rolls. It was fun. I had four rolls. I only made three rolls. I ran out of room in my crescent roll container. It was orange. It contained three rolls of crescent rolls. That was about 24 crescent rolls. That was a lot of crescent rolls. I got myself ready to leave to stay the night on Thanksgiving night. I prepared clothing and other necessities. I thought about which underwear I wanted to bring. I thought about which socks I wanted to bring. I brought my thickest socks. I had to wear my loose shoes with them. I wore my loose shoes. I brought my hairbrush. It was fun to get ready to leave. I brought my strawberries. I was worried they would go bad. I drove in my car to my parent's house for Thanksgiving Dinner Day. I got to my parent's house. I ate all my strawberries. I had some coffee. I needed coffee to wake up. I had risen early that morning to prepare myself and to make the crescent rolls.

My cousin was walking down stairs from having just woken up when I walked into my parent's house. I was listening to my iPod. My aunt was there and also there were my parents, both my mother and my father. We all sat down and talked. My mother and my father and my aunt and my cousin and myself all have laptops. We all sat on our laptops. My mother finished making and preparing things to eat. We ate some snacks like oysters and artichoke hearts and olives and carrots and broccoli and cauliflower and a special kind of dip made from canned milk, cream cheese and horseradish. We talked and chit chatted. Soon my brother arrived. My brother arrived with his dog, Chachi. Also, I forgot to mention that my aunt and my cousin brought their dogs Gina and Koda to visit on Thanksgiving Dinner Day too. Gina is Koda's mom. Chachi is my brother's dog. Chachi is Gina's baby boy dog. Chachi is Koda's brother. Chachi and Koda are brothers. My brother has a dog that is my aunt's dog's brother. My aunt has a dog that is my brother's dog's mother. The dogs played and fought and snarled and crashed into one another. Gina is a girl and Koda and Chachi are both males. We were concerned and spoke briefly about which might be the dominant male. Gina is the dominant one I think. Gina is sort of gimpy because she had an accident and was paralyzed. My aunt has to stick her finger in Gina's butt every time Gina needs to go poop. Gina has an acupuncturist and a dog neurologist. Gina walks pretty well for having been paralyzed from the dog waist down.

My brother and my father and my mother and my cousin and my aunt and I all talked and chatted and ate snacks. We made jokes and sang songs and played the piano and the guitar and the banjo and looked at stuff on our computers. My brother doesn't have a laptop but he has a fancy new computer at his home. My brother talks all the time about downloading stuff illegally off of the Internet. Every other sentence he said on Thanksgiving Dinner Day began or ended with, "I download this and that illegally off the Internet." He is really proud of all the stuff he's downloaded illegally off the Internet. He is going to give us all illegally downloaded DVDs and CDs for Christmas. My aunt wants him to make copies of Kolchack: The Night Stalker. My brother named his son Kolchack after Carl Kolchack: The Night Stalker. We all call him Jack. He was with his mom this Thanksgiving Dinner. My brother made a list of things my family wants him to illegally download for Christmas presents. I told him I wanted all of the Sopranos. He said this was no problem at all because he already had the first six seasons. I told him that I could just start with that and then watch the rest through legal means and then I wouldn't feel bad.

My aunt and I argued about how Baby Boomers are ruining the world. She thinks they aren't but I think they are. My brother egged us on and said bad things and made jokes in poor taste. We talked a lot about stuff on the Internet and movies and t.v. shows. My aunt admitted that for a long time she thought my brother had named his son after the character that David Hasselhoff played in Knightrider. We all laughed at her but now that I've thought about it this might not have even been as ridiculous as naming your child after Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Soon my grandmother and uncle came. My aunt and uncle are my mom's brother and my mom's sister. My grandmother is my mother's mother. My cousin is my mother's sister's daughter. I also have a sister. She has a family. They weren't there. My uncle and my grandmother brought pies. We now had a turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberries, dressing with onions, dressing with no onions, gravy, broccoli, 24 crescent rolls, pumpkin pie, cherry pie, apple pie, pecan pie, and other types of snacks like the ones I mentioned before. I said, "How come I like oysters out of a can but I don't like oysters in a restaurant?" and my aunt said it was because I am snooty white trash. My family often refers to themselves as Snooty White Trash. The wi-fi connection that my parents now have in their home is named "SNOOTY." My sister called it this when she set up their wi-fi for their matching laptops that have their names on them that my sister created with a label maker that I think she has at her office. One says, "Gerald" and one says "Nicole." Those are my parent's names. That way, they won't get mixed up because their laptops are identical. My laptop is the same but older. My aunt has a macbook. Her screen is really big.

We talked some more and yelled and argued and sang songs and ate and made jokes for a while after my grandmother and uncle arrived. We had to make sure the dogs were all outside when my grandmother arrived because she is 89 and can be knocked over when one of them so much as sniffs her, let alone three of them jumping all over her and trying to lick her all over as they do. They are three Labrador retrievers. I don't think I mentioned that before. Gina and Chachi are chocolate labs and Koda is black. Chachi and Koda's father is a yellow lab. Labs are competitively obedient. These labs are mostly just wild wild dogs.

I shot some video with my camera and so did my aunt. Then we all sat down to eat. Everyone started eating even before my mom had sat down. I thought this was rude but then she said to go ahead. My aunt recorded all of us saying what we were thankful for. I can't remember what I said. Something flippant, most likely. My family never takes things seriously. My dad pretended to do some Latin catholic prayer and made fart noises with his mouth. We talked at length about a podcast that both my aunt and I had listened to from Slate.com about whether or not Thanksgiving is a religious holiday. Most of us thought that it wasn't because we thought the thanks we were giving was a general thanks to people and stuff and we also thought that the original Thanks were given to the Native Americans who helped the pilgrims not to starve to death but my dad, who was raised catholic, said that was all a bunch of crap and that the pilgrims were thanking God and that Thanksgiving is a day when you thank God for all of your blessings and that the pilgrims wanted the Native Americans to convert and thank their Christian God and that we are all crazy for thinking Thanksgiving is a secular holiday like the Fourth of July. We agreed to disagree. I can't remember now if my dad is an atheist or not. It is easy to forget.

I tried to record the whole Thanksgiving Dinner conversation on my laptop but I forgot my microphone and had to borrow my dad's and it didn't work right but I didn't know until I checked later and saw that it didn't record anything really. Only about 30seconds was all. It was for the best though because I think my mom would have been mad that I recorded everything without telling anyone.

After Thanksgiving Dinner was done my cousin Maggie and I drove to the store to get mostly white things and one sparkly thing. We had to memorize what we were to get because we were too full from eating to find a piece of paper and a pen. It was a fun game to remember the list. I still remember it. We remembered by remembering that they were almost all white things except for one thing that was sparkly. It was paper towels, one half gallon of non-fat milk, one half gallon of whole milk, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and two bottles of sparkling cider. The paper towels we got were called "Sparkle" paper towels and we thought that was funny. No one else thought it was particularly funny. We also got gum at the check out. My mother had given me twenty dollars and Maggie's mother had given her twenty dollars. They told us to keep the change. We got 16 dollars and some change back. We were going to split the change evenly between us because this is also kind of funny but we got a ten and then a five and a one back so I just took six dollars and let Maggie have the ten because she is only 20 and she needs the extra cash for her drugs or whatever 20 year olds do these days.

When we got home everyone ate pie. Maggie got out the chocolates that she had brought from her job. She works at a chocolate factory. It is actually just a chocolate shop but they make chocolate there so it is sort of like a factory. They make delicious chocolates. One was spicy, she told me, but I didn't want that one.

I can't remember what happened then. I think my aunt and my uncle and I argued over who gets more hits on our respective blogs and websites and my uncle won. Also, we argued about who had the weirdest search phrases that will link to our sites. My uncle won that argument too. My uncle and my aunt played cribbage. She won but she almost didn't because my uncle tried to cheat her by implying that he won at the very end without actually counting the points of his last hand. She didn't bother counting either. I think he felt bad though because he gave her the dollar they were playing for. My aunt and I played cribbage the next day, on a side note, and we also bet a dollar, as is the usual bet in my family when we play cribbage, except when we play cribbage and bet a dollar we call it a skoot. I won and she never paid me my god damned dollar. She is a dirty welcher.

Everyone kind of just lounged around uncomfortably and moaned for a while then. My mom and dad took naps. I talked to my grandmother. I took a lot of pictures. The dogs played and ran around. Hours passed. We all lost track of time. My sister called and we talked to her on the phone about her Thanksgiving Day with her family.

My uncle and grandmother drove home. The rest of us tried to decide what game we were all going to play together. Usually we play Scattergories or Taboo or a card game like Hearts or Thirteen. My brother tried to get us to play the Lord of the Rings Risk game that he had gotten at the Good Will. He set up the board and the pieces and we looked at the map and talked about the differences between the regular Risk game and the Lord of the Rings Risk game and then I put it away while we were removing the leaf from the table. I've never liked Risk much. Takes too long.

I tried to get everyone to play Headbanz because it is a really fun game but some people didn't want to. I promised that it was the most fun game and so we started to play it and then we had the most fun. First, it is fun because you get to wear a red headband. Second, it is fun because everyone gets to see the card stuck in your headband except you. And then you have to ask questions to guess where or what or who is represented on your card. One of the cards that I got was a Mermaid and it took me forever. Another one that my brother got was Atlantic City and it took him forever. My dad got Pizza and quit because he couldn't get it. He started playing again when we were all having fun and he got bored. My mom gave obvious hints instead of just answering yes or no questions and I got mad at her. No one would answer the questions in a straightforward manner. We became frustrated and then we would laugh and laugh. It was the best game ever.

My brother and his dog Chachi left after that. My mother and father and aunt and cousin and myself all started to play the initial game. My dad went to bed because he was too tired to play. The four of us played the initial game for a long time after that. The initial game is another game my family plays all the time. It is fun because you can play it anywhere just to pass time. It is easy to play. You just think of a famous person and say his or her initials and then they have to ask you questions about your person to determine who you are. One that I had that took people a long time to guess was M.S. After this is over you can ask me questions and I'll answer them and you can try to guess who M.S. is.

We were all very very tired then and we all went to sleep. Thanksgiving was over. Thanks.