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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.

Yeah, I know most folks would choose Christmas as their favorite, but not me. Namely, because I was a chubby kid, and we chubby kids preferred our holidays to center around cholesterol.

See, in my family, the ladies would start preparing many days in advance for the big calorie party.

You'd see females dust and countertops with flour working tirelessly on butcher blocks, wielding surgically sharp cutlery and threatening to neuter any male who came within 14 feet of her range oven.

The house would be a symphony of chopping sounds, cabinets slamming, and the roar of Briggs

and Stratton 12-horsepower hand-mixers.

Christmas simply could not compare to Thanksgiving.

At Thanksgiving, the food spread was sinful enough to qualify for an R-rating.

We had heaps of refined carbohydrates, wads of saturated fat, volcanoes of gluten, and fruit pies that

were completely obscured by ready whip. Whereas, at Christmas time, all I got was khakis. Our child at home would be inundated

with loud family members. Sometimes they were loitering in our house, people who I'd never even met.

Come say hi to your cousin Hilda, my mother would say matting my hair with her own spit.

Cousin Hilda was 94 years old, a complete stranger to me, and she talked at length about the disruptive nature of kidney stones to anyone with an ear shot.

All day, the walls of our house would throb with the sounds of human voices, and even though our family was decidedly dysfunctional, it was pretty fun.

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