My parents set a firm tradition
That had myself and siblings wishin’
That we were not among the living
When it came time to have Thanksgiving.

We always went to other houses
Where aunts and uncles (and their spouses)
Would ask our parents to present us
So they could torture and torment us.

They thought themselves to be adoring
When actually, these folks were boring!
Our relatives were all consistent --
So dull and slow and wit-resistant.

Yet still we’d visit with them yearly
To pay the price and suffer dearly.
As kids, we never knew the reason
Our folks were mean throughout this season.

But now, grown up, there’s understanding
Of why adults are so demanding.
We suffered torture every fall, so
We’ll make our children suffer also.

I know you’re probably expecting another sentimental and gushing homage to all the things I’m thankful for in this world; you know…like my family, friends, steady income, roof-over-my-head security, cuddly kittens, and clean-safe-and-economical nuclear power. Well, those things are great, no doubt, and I am thankful for them, but going on and on about it would not begin to give you a picture of how I really feel about Thanksgiving. Please join me on a journey into the dark and frightening world of the Heggy family’s macabre and demented holiday traditions…if you dare!

Picture this: You’re a kid, say…about 9 years old. For two weeks before Thanksgiving, every school day is spent cutting gaily colored construction paper into the shapes of Tom Turkey and blunderbuss-toting black-hatted pilgrims. Everywhere you look you see images of pumpkin pie, juicy slabs of white meat, and giant mounds of fluffy mashed potatoes. Everyone talks of the joys of being out of school, decadently eating until comatose, and watching grownups on TV make fools of themselves by carrying giant animal-shaped balloons as they chase brightly plumed marching bands down the streets of the mythical city of “Macys”.

Finally, the week arrives. On Monday, you’re psyched. On Tuesday, you’re positively buzzing. By Wednesday, you can hardly contain yourself with the joy of know that TOMORROW IS THANKSGIVING! YEA!

Unless you’re in the Heggy family, that is. In this select group, Wednesday is a day of deep mourning and nightmarish fears of the hell that is about to be unleashed upon your head. “Please, God”, you pray, “Let me have one more day with the construction paper. Oh, please!”.

But by early Thursday morning, you’re seriously considering atheism, because your prayers have gone unheeded. “C’mon kids,” Dad says, “Let’s load up the car.”

The car, in this case, is a 1954 Dodge behemoth of some sort. (I’m thinking that it probably had some sort of model designation, but I was never aware of it. To our family, it was simply “the Dodge”.) It was roundish and red and probably weighed as much as a Sherman tank. No air conditioning, no seat belts, and no radio. As we traveled, we always sang “Bingo Was His Name-O” and crap like that…never suspecting that the rich people who could afford radios were able to listen to Carl Perkins, Sheb Wooley, and even Elvis.

Three kids in the back seat, under no restraint system at all. This meant plenty of action, including the time-honored tradition of the “You’re on MY side” debate. Followed by wrestling, kicking, biting, screaming, and finally the deeply intoned parental dictum: “Don’t make me stop this car!”

Anyway, the destination of each of these Thanksgiving treks was always one of the small Kansas towns that contained relatives on my dad’s side of the family. Towns like Stafford, Kinsley, Mulvane, and Derby. Since we were from the giant metropolis of Wichita, these communities were unbearably Podunkish in the eyes of the sophisticated Heggy sprats. (I still remember the excitement I felt in discovering what the hell a “derby” was – when watching the Rocky and Bullwinkle episode about the “Kerwood Derby”. To this day, though, I have NO IDEA what the heck a Mulvane is. Some kind of a cross between a mulberry and a wind direction indicator, I’d guess.)

We were just about the only kids in the extended family. If I ever get past the heebie jeebies I get from thinking about it, I may someday want to analyze why we kids were even included in this group, when nearly everyone else invited was around the age 80.

Now, I’ve got nothing at all against 80-year-olds. In fact, these days I know quite a few of the “youth-challenged” who are very cool. But when you’re 9 years old, you expect to find something to do when you visit someone’s home. If the 80-year-old was at least a grandparent, then you could expect them to be prepared with some sort of playthings…crayons at least, and maybe a mismatched set of army men or plastic horses or something. But none of our relatives seemed to have ever had children, nor had ever even been exposed to the concept. Everything in these houses was either classified as “Don’t Touch” or “Don’t Go In There”.

It was not a problem complying with those classifications. Most of the “Don’t Touch” stuff smelled funny or had old people cooties on it. And the “Don’t Go In There” places were so genuinely creepy that we really had no desire to risk seeing what was behind the Forbidden Door.

In fact, the whole house was creepy. (Note: even though we went to a different relative’s home each Thanksgiving, they all had sort of an eerie reverse-Stepford uniformity. Since they all blur together in my suppressed memories, I’ll simply describe an aggregate image. I suppose I should change the names to protect the innocent…but screw it.) Perhaps this creepiness was merely the result of perceptions tainted by the fact that I and my siblings had been raised in the age of electricity; therefore having eyes that were used to illumination of a certain minimal wattage. My geriatric relatives, though, had all been raised in the days where you had to boil your prize pet pig in order to obtain the tallow to make a candle so you could see well enough to load your musket to defend your home against the Savage Redskins whose land you’d settled on and whose buffalo you’d made a rug out of.

By jiggers, them folks had lived a long time without none of them newfangled electrical contraptions, and they wasn’t about to go a-paying money to no gosh-durned Power Company just a-cuz some spoiled brat relative kids wanted to be able to see well enough to keep from walking into the walls on Thanksgiving Day. No siree.

These were people who had essentially dropped out of life decades ago, and were just hanging out, waiting for the Good Lord to take them from this earthly misery and carry them to their eternal reward. Hoping that this “reward” was located in someplace dark, I’d guess.

My dad’s side of the family did have one cool relative. His name was Uncle Earl, and he was a (gasp!) chiropractor. I was told repeatedly by the other clan geezers that we should love Uncle Earl, and treat him as you would any Good Christian (except those damn Episcopalians, of course), but pray for him because he is a (gasp!) chiropractor, and everyone knows that they are Quacks.

Uncle Earl was the only member of the family who earned a decent living, which puzzled me since a certified Quack would surely be tarred and feathered and run out of town in a heartbeat, wouldn’t he? Yet Earl’s patients seemed to be quite satisfied with the results they received from his treatments, and he had a dandy little income from repeat business. Hmmm. Something does not compute, here. Maybe the geezers were misinformed, just a little bit?

Earl also had a sense of humor, as did his wife, Aunt Edith. Again, this was frowned upon in the family, though I was never quite sure why. It was considered far more appropriate to talk of famine and pestilence than it was to talk about a traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter. As I recall it, the most oft-repeated statements at these Thanksgiving Dinners were either about people who had recently died, or about the folks in town who had recently undergone horribly painful surgery. Followed of course, by a detailed description of each and every incision, along with an impassioned soliloquy about the precise type of pain the incision caused.

At Uncle Earl and Aunt Edith’s house, there were no “Don’t go in there” restrictions. I remember the awe with which I first beheld the shiny stainless steel and rich Corinthian leather of the (gasp!) chiropractic equipment in his home office. Seeing those dazzling and gleaming benches and tables with all their adjustments and controls is probably what made it so easy for me to accept the precepts of Star Trek when it came along a few years later.

But the coolest thing about Uncle Earl’s house was hidden in the basement. It was dark, of course, but there was just enough light to make out the wonders to be found. As you first entered the basement, you became aware of faint rustling and chirring sounds. As your eyes adjusted, you began to focus on rows and rows of wire compartments – each of which contained an alien-looking furred creature of some sort. They weren’t hamsters. They weren’t gerbils. What the hell were they?

Turns out they were chinchillas. After being told that Earl was a chinchilla rancher, I naturally made the assumption that he was raising the cute little critters so that kids like myself could wake up on Christmas morn and find a cuddly new pet under the tree. I decided that if I got one, I’d call him Charlie Chinchilla, and would hold him and squeeze him and love him and…

Well, I never got one, and it wasn’t until many years later that I learned the business-related truth behind the fascinating basement chinchilla ranch. Unfortunately, Earl died before I could properly suck up, so none of his chiro-chilla fortune ever made it into my bank account. Bummer.

Anyway, back to the Thanksgiving Dinner. After sitting in freakish un-childlike stillness for 4 or 5 hours (since we weren’t allowed to do anything else), we were finally allowed to partake of the wondrous feast of Thanksgiving Dinner.

OK, so maybe it wasn’t wondrous, but it sure beat the heck out of sitting around listening to surgery stories and speculation about which relative would be the next to “pass on to Glory”. We were cautioned to be careful of the lead shot that might be found within the bird, and we were admonished to be sure to eat some cranberry sauce. I never understood that – why in world would anyone want to eat something that the mere sight of would cause the Ghostbusters to power up their backpacks? Now, I’ve eaten raw cranberries; they’re a little tart, but edible…so what could possibly motivate someone to take these nice little berries and turn them into a putrid blob of quivering goo?

The mashed potatoes were good, though. And the hot rolls were very good. The pumpkin pie was even excellent. The trick was learning to avoid the lead shot in the green beans (they harvested beans with a shotgun?), the whipped “Jell-O ‘N’ Puke” salad, and of course, Satan’s own holiday treat – the yams. Somebody in the family had come up with a recipe for taking an ordinary and possibly tasty tuberous vegetable and turning it into an abomination that even bacteria wouldn’t touch; and then somehow convinced everyone in the group to agree to make it precisely the same way every year. Auggh!

So it was really the yams that were responsible for my finally being able to understand why the homes were kept so dark. You see, since my siblings and I were under Federal Mandate to Clean Our Plates, we’d try very hard not to let any demon yams get anywhere near us. Yet inevitably, Aunt Ella or Uncle Walter or Shirley or Betty Jean would sneak up behind and, WHUMP – a large glop of brownish orange sludge would land on my plate, contaminating rolls and turkey with its evil presence. We’d then have to wait until the adult’s conversation turned to the description of a particularly fascinating gall bladder removal; once their attention was riveted on the subject, we could sneak away from the table and deposit the yams down one of the floor-mounted heat registers in a particularly dark corner of the house.

(Don’t know what the half-life of those yams is, but I’d be willing to bet that they’re still in that house, still pulsating in synchronization with the rhythms of Beelzebub’s furnace. If you’re going to buy a home in Stafford or Derby, make sure you take in a powerful light source and search the corners thoroughly. Your eternal soul may depend on it.)

Somehow, though, we survived. And by spending Friday, Saturday, and Sunday detoxifying, we were able to resume normal activities by Monday. My parents never explained why we deserved such Thanksgiving torture each year, except by repeating the cryptic phrase, “It’s what families do.”

Well, now I’m a parent. My wife and I get to choose how to spend Thanksgiving. Once I reached the age where I could make my own choices, of course, I never returned to the scenes of any of those “family” events – so I don’t really know whether any of that extended clan survives to this day. Since they were already fossilized when I was a little kid, I’ve got to assume that they’ve all passed on to their reward, and are now singing Kum Bah Yah with Jesus in Heaven, just like they always wanted to do instead of living in a world with new-fangled stuff like electricity and radio and food that doesn’t give Freddy Krueger nightmares. So it’s not even possible for me to pass on the identical Thanksgiving tradition to my kid.

We just stay at home and order a pizza. But I still feel obligated to honor the traditions that my parents believed in. So, until the pizza arrives, we make the kid lie in a pit full of spiders, snakes, oozing slime, and cow manure for several hours. It’s not the exact same thing as traveling to Stafford and spending time with the relatives, but it’s close.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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