Flying Turkeys - Sam Flomenhoft

Thanksgiving is widely regarded as one of the better holidays of the year and many people's favorite. With the holiday comes the image of the big extended family meeting in a big city and sharing stories of the past year and being amazed "at just how much (insert child's name here) has grown". My thanksgiving is usually like this (except we all meet in Lexington) and I always have to go through a lot of inspection of my changes. 

My favorite memory of Thanksgiving comes from a very recent year. Our cousins had brought a whip cream gun. Essentially, you fill it with cream (and sugar if you want), shake it up, and then spray it on your pumpkin pie in any aesthetic design you want. The problem was there were two discreet problems to this new discovery which we would soon find out. Originally we were unable to get the whip cream to come out so we shook it up. For a long time. A very long time. After a solid ten minutes of vigorous shaking we went to spray it on the first pie and when the trigger was pressed down fully whipped cream shot out and exploded everywhere and I mean everywhere. It flew a solid fifteen feet in the air and all the way across the twenty foot table. That was the first problem. The second was, even after we figured out how to control this incredible power the whipped cream had no taste. We weren't aware that we were supposed to add sugar so the cream had only a disgusting nitrogen oxide taste, which you might compare to seltzer water. Even though it didn't make our food taste better, this event made it a memorable Thanksgiving. 

Overall I like Thanksgiving. It has much to offer: good food, good football, and good family. But at each Thanksgiving every year there are tense moments when the excessive family time gets to someone and a fight explodes. Even so, this is usually only enough to ruin the mood for a shot couple of minutes and its back to Thanksgiving cheer quickly. In the end I don't think Thanksgiving always lives up to its unrealistic expectations but its always a fun, memorable holiday.