Happy Thanksgiving!
Note: The staff and management of The Curious Urinal are off today, enjoying the holiday with their families--- feeding their faces (stuffing their bellies with turkey, and all manners of foods and spirits, all the while watching parades and football on TV)--- the janitor will be working to make sure that this Special Edition gets published.
Since this is a Special Thanksgiving Edition of The Curious Urinal, we'd like to tell you the Real Story of how Thanksgiving was first celebrated.
The First Thanksgiving (Revised Edition)
It was the last Thursday in November when a bunch of Pilgrims came together and decided to have a feast.
But before I tell you that part of the story, I should talk about what led up to that particular day.
History tells us that the Pilgrims landed upon Plymouth Rock and they nearly starved until some Indians (Native Americans since Political Correctness came along) saved their collective bacon. And in thanks for the Indians help, the Pilgrims prepared a big feast for them.
But the mostly true and untold story is this:
It was a cold day in the spring when the Mayflower came ambling along and, in a fog, crash landed against this big rock that jutted up from the shoreline. On that rock was scrawled some strange writing, that was translated much later by some Indians.
When the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived in the New World, they had no money, no food, and hardly enough brains between them to figure out how to read a map. Had they read the map correctly, they would have arrived in Sunny Florida near Miami. But Captain John Q. Public of the Mayflower was laying drunk below deck when the miscalculation occurred. The pilot of the ship at that hour, Biff Rongway, was holding the poorly drawn map upside down, and steered the ship north instead of south.
Rongway crash landed the ship into the big rock and everyone aboard, with exception of Captain Public, came out of their cabins expecting sunny weather and a nice hotel room awaiting them. Things weren’t looking good at that point. So, the Pilgrims decided that since the boat was now taking on water, they would abandon it and hope to find shelter around them. All they found was desolation. The vast forest was unsuitable for much of anything except for beavers and the occasional mountain lion that came along and ate someone.
The summer wasn’t much better for the Pilgrims. They wandered aimlessly, foraging for berries and wild game. They had stiff competition from bears, and the mountain lions as well. Pretty soon, nearly half of the Pilgrims were dead and the other half wanting refunds for the ill-fated cruise they had undertaken.
Captain John Q. Public, who was now out of booze, and hardly accommodating to anyone, decided that he would take charge of the situation and go find a gas station somewhere close by so that they could get someone to come repair the ship. He was never heard from again… For at least three days. When he returned, he brought with him several Indians that began helping these new people to hunt and fish and skin mountain lions and bears for food, and to make coats for the harsh winters they would have to endure.
And one of the Indians, Sitting Duck, translated the scrawling on the big rock that the ship has crashed into. It read:
Caution - Big rock… Don’t run into.
And below the warning was another message:
Looking for parts for a ’53 Plymouth. Send smoke signals to Soggy Beaver.
And thus, it became known as Plymouth Rock.
Meanwhile, as the Pilgrims learned to adapt to their new found surroundings, Haji Hockalugi opened up the world’s first convenience store. It was called 5/9. But since he liked to sleep in, he changed the hours to 7/11.
And thanks to the Indians, the Pilgrims survived the next winter much easier than their first one. The Indians had shown them how to build a fire.
So, that next fall, after the first harvests of corn, beans, lemon beets and tobacco-flavored cumquats, the Pilgrims decided to have a feast. It was the last Thursday in November. Soggy Beaver had acquired the parts he needed for the ‘53 Plymouth, so he and a bunch of his Indian friends drove to the encampment to eat with the Pilgrims, seeing that the 7/11 was closed due to lack of Slurpee ingredients... Well, that and Haji Hockalugi overslept again.
On the way, they ran over a wild turkey and stopped to pick it up, bringing it to the feast. And it was a good thing, since fishing had not been good that day. So, the bird was dropped into a vat of grease and was served with the rest of the harvest.
Thus, the turkey (regardless if it was road kill or not) was established as the meat of choice on Thanksgiving Day.
And that is the true story of Thanksgiving… Well, all except for the parts that you’ve never heard before.
Have a safe and
Happy Thanksgiving
from The Curious Urinal.
