Rules for Thanksgiving

Two rules for Thanksgiving:

Tommy Orange, author of There There.

1. Do not call it "Turkey day" or say "gobble gobble" in any context. It is the opposite of funny, unless you're talking to someone under the age of seven.
2. Do not engage in political discussions at the table or at any time during the gathering. If you must, read this article before you do so you can avoid saying things that are demonstrably false: NYTimes. Much better, though, would be reading this article: NYTimesII. Neither of these are lefty articles. Or righty.
In my case, I had an argument with one brother on Sunday. Not that I'd planned on spending the day with him and his family. The second brother has invited me but I'd be the only one at his table with the political and social opinions that I have and I'm not good company these days anyway, so I've declined, saying I "have other plans." My best Thanksgivings are the ones I've spent alone, and this will be one of them. 
A factual paragraph from the prologue of Tommy Orange's excellent 2018 novel, There There:

In 1621, colonists invited Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. Massasoit came with ninety of his men. That meal is why we still eat a meal together in November. Celebrate it as a nation. But that one wasn't a thanksgiving meal. It was a land-deal meal. Two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. Two hundred Indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison.

Body Bags

"I'm going to eat them," the Complete and Total Loser would say to his mother.
"Don't you dare!" she'd say.
They were talking about the koi in the tiny artificial pond the Loser's late parents installed in the 1980s, where five colorful, large fish levitated under water until a surprisingly small amount of food was flung on the surface of their home each day, at which point they'd lunge to the surface to eat as much as they could, not caring if their only companions starved to death right in front of them.

Dead fish in bags wait to be buried. Someday we'll all end up as some version of the fish in the bags in this picture.

Around the time the Loser's parents had the pond put in the Loser was living in China, where he taught English (a moronic calling he was well suited to, being a moron) and often eating koi, which when not bred for color is a common food there and goes by the humbler name of carp. 
The Loser's mother knew he was kidding. It was a joke he stopped making a year or so before her death a year ago. She no longer had the energy for mock threats.
Two days ago the man who services the pond came by to clean it out and ready it for the coming winter months, when the fish slow down and don't eat yet still use as much oxygen as at any other time. Yesterday morning, the Loser went to check on them before going to work. One of the five was dead, another was close to it and the others didn't look well. Of course, the fish guy screwed up and the bill (ha!) he left didn't have his cell phone number on it, no one at the company picked up and the website is useless and looks like a seventy-year-old designed it. The Loser finally got in touch with the fish guy around 11 and he managed to save two of the koi. 
Koi can live for decades (the oldest is said to be 226 years old) and these were just fifteen. 
The Loser's parents loved those fish. 
The Loser told the fish guy to put them in bags so he can bury them, which he's about to do. It'll take a large hole. They were as big as cats. 
That's how the Loser will spend a chunk of this Thanksgiving Day.
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The fish are underground now and will nourish the trees as they decompose. The Loser couldn't just cut the bags open and throw them in like garbage so he did it by hand. They were cold and covered with slime. Their weight felt like soft muscle. Their eyes were clouded over but their colors were still bright. 
Before he scraped the dirt back in the hole the Loser threw in some coins. A penny, a nickle, a dime a quarter. He did this so if some day in the distant future some digger found fish bones in an odd place he or she would know that these three fish lived with humans, that they were a part of our lives. 

The Loser's Thanksgiving

Most people he knows would rather be doing something else today. 

The women are doing the cooking (Still! In 2011!) and the men are going because the women are making them.

The Complete and Total Loser is doing what he wants. When he turned 50 a few years ago he decided to slip off the shackles of tradition that require such days to be observed so he spends them solo, eating a simple meal, snoozing and reading. Soon, he'll visit his father in the rehabilitation facility he's been in since a mild stroke led to a fall last week. He will stay in his father's and late mother's house. He has a book to read, a Netflix movie to watch, and laundry to do. It's gotten chilly and he's dialed the thermostat up to 70. 

The Loser's father eats institutional food for Thanksgiving.