Lex Anteinternet: Thanksgiving

 Casper's Thomas Gobbler, the urban (and not very smart) turkey on the town.  I always wonder if he'll be around after Thanksgiving every year.

Back in 2013 I ran a long item (as I am, of course, wont to do) on Thanksgiving as a holiday.  As I still think that entry is pretty good, I'll simply direct us back to that item, here:

Lex Anteinternet: Thanksgiving: Today, November 22, is the Thanksgiving Holiday for 2012.  Thanksgiving remains one of the two really big holidays in the United States, ...

Of note, in 2013, Thanksgiving was apparently on November 22.  That seems rather early to me, but this year I'm also reminded, as I've been running things from 1916, that in that year it was on November 23.

I don't usually write the essay of "what we're grateful for", but I'll depart just a bit to note that I'm grateful that 2016 is drawing to a close.  It's been a terrible year for me, with a lot of disasters of one kind or another, and the death of my mother, which because of the circumstances of it made for what seemed to me to be the loss of my mother and my father (who actually died over twenty years ago).  So on a personal level, it hasn't been a great year.  I'm glad and thankful for the chance to have a four day holiday, as I frankly need it a bit this year.

The overall blue nature of the year, at least for me, has been compounded by the recent bizarre election.  I've quite running so many after action items on that as there's just a flood of them, and to some extent I'm just going to wait to see how things turn out next year.  Suffice it to say, I was stunned and amazed that Donald Trump received the GOP nomination and that he was elected President.  But then I was baffled by why the Democrats would take a page out of their past and go back to a candidate who just screamed 1970s establishment to everyone.  Bizarre. 

On a local level we saw some odd politics as well, although it seemed to smooth out.  Having said that, this upcoming Legislative session is going to see another shortsighted effort to seize lands from the Federal Government we promised not to mess with when we became a state, so more stress for the regular Wyomingites in the offering.

Which brings me to this.  I know that Thanksgiving is the traditional "turkey day", and is usually marked by the watching of endless football games.  But try to get out a bit.  This holiday, more than others, has an outdoor origin really.  And just watching the America's dullest pastime on television misses the point.  And we all need a break.