Thanksgiving Celebration:
A Look into Cranberry Sauce
Editor's Note: Being the hippie vegetarian communist traitor that I am, I did not eat turkey on thanksgiving.
Ahhh, Thanksgiving, the most happiest, most traveled time of the year. There is no time better for family, even including Christmas. Thanksgiving is a great the celebration of what we are thankful for.
Thanksgiving has special meaning to all of us: its a time where we can reflect on how the white man came to America and enslaved the native population, and then gave them smallpox (though not necessarily within that order).
But that's not what I'm here to talk about.
Thanksgiving was proclaimed a national holiday in 1789 by George Washington, who coined such rhetorical questions as, "Do YOU know the price of avarice?" and wore hats that were fashionable about 300 years ago (which now just make him look like a flaming idiot in pictures). After celebration of Thanksgiving within the 13 colonies of the protestant kingdom-- I mean America had continued for a long time, with cooperation among the enslaved Native American population adding an ethnic mix to an already whack as hell holiday, President Washington decided that a national holiday would suit the colonies better. Many pilgrims were angry at the federalists for wanting to 'impose' national holidays because they were stupid pilgrims who were former peasants in Britain, and gave smallpox to native Americans.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about at all.
What I did want to talk about was cranberry sauce.
I know some of you might be saying, "Oh, I like cranberry sauce!", but I
imagine if my research* has proven true, then the majority of you readers are
going, "That shit fucking sucks". Well, you're kinda right: cranberry sauce is
weird, and its not even that tasty.
Listen, when's the last time someone at the thanksgiving dinner table leaped at the cranberry sauce and said, "Oh geez oh geez oh geez, I sure do love cranberry sauce! Its my favorite part of thanksgiving!" That's right, folks: in the history of thanksgiving, those words have never come out of anyone's mouth. Ever.
Why is this congealed mass of cranberry goodness so despised across celebrating America? Easy. Because its a fuckin jellyfish.
Jellyfish: worms of the deep, or canned goods?
I mean, think about it. They have the same consistency as our famed cranberry sauce, without a doubt. They don't have souls, so we don't have to mourn their deaths by putting "This tuna is dolphin free" on the packaging, and they are invertebrates, meaning that their bodies are absent of vertebrae, making them easy to fit inside a can! It's goddamn simple, and for that, goddamn scary. There's turkey, there's stuffing, there's mashed potatoes and cole slaw, and then there's jellyfish carcass in the shape of a can that someone slops together 5 minutes before the dinner bell rings on Thanksgiving day.
Here's the potential problems I see in this:
1. Jellyfish have stingers. They will fuckin kill you if you aren't careful.
2. People eat only half the jellyfish and leave the rest of it for 'thanksgiving leftovers', and the cranberry sauce/jellyfish gets thrown in the trash (because of course nobody eats it) where it congeals to form a new jellyfish and infects the water supply.
3. It tastes like crap.
So, my lesson is: don't eat cranberry sauce because it looks like, and may indeed be, a jellyfish.
*asking people that I know hate it whether they like cranberry sauce
To give credit where it's due, I give initial research credit to Kate Baker, philosophy major at Villanova