I grew up as the daughter of an abused child. My grandfather, and his father before that, were the villains of our family. I grew up recognizing the symptoms of child abuse in my mother, and I learned how to handle their manifestations which often shocked or overwhelmed people who were not familiar with them. When I was about 9, I watched my mother yank a truck driver out of the cab of his semi. He had been speeding, tail-gating and menacing us on the road, and his threatening behavior flipped the little switch in my mother’s brain which had developed after years of abuse. Her rational brain shut off; she was on auto-pilot, reacting solely to what she perceived as a bully using his position to frighten and endanger her and her children. When she came to a stop sign, she got out of the car, stalked back to his truck and hauled him out. He practically fell on top of her as she was screaming at him. Luckily for her, he was a small man, and he was so taken aback by her fury, he just stammered something about her being “crazy,” scrambled back into his cab and sped away.

Despite her occasional scary outbursts, my mom never abused me or my sister. She was one of those amazing victims who was able to stop the cycle of violence, and for that, she will always be a hero to me. But I did have to learn to watch for “the signs” that the switch was about to flip. In any situation where she saw bullying, where someone bigger and stronger was threatening someone smaller and weaker, particularly if the bully was a man, and the victim was a woman, child or animal, I could see my mom’s back stiffen, her jaw would set, and something would come into her eyes that eventually became familiar to me, although I cannot name it. On more than one occasion, I have had to physically restrain her from going after a complete stranger who was behaving badly.

That’s my mom. She’s the champion of the little guy, and I love that about her, but it can be frightening. On a handful of occasions, she’s turned that fury on people she loved, though never in a violent way. Years of tangling with my grandfather - a very intelligent, ex-military, professional boxer - have turned my mom into a formidable fighter. She can argue with you for days! She will pull out all the stops too. If she feels threatened, that switch will flip, and you’re in for a long, nasty haul. As I said, I can recognize the signs and avoid the marathon arguments. Growing up with my mom taught me some very useful things about adult victims of child abuse.

Which brings me to the real reason for writing this blog entry. In 1996, I met the man who would become my husband. An ex-boyfriend of mine called me up and said he wanted to introduce me to his new roommate, Sean. (Yes, I know it’s unusual - I had a pattern of breaking up with guys without alienating them.) I walked into their quintessential bachelor pad - all high-end wi-fi stereo, big screen TV, video game systems, wires everywhere, a few mismatched sticks of ancient furniture, empty pizza boxes and beer cans and overflowing ash trays. My guy was standing in the middle of the room with an electric guitar slung around his shoulders and a lit cigarette tucked between the strings at the top of the guitar. It was love at first sight.

More than that, though, we were a perfect match, if there is such a thing. Partly because Sean is an adult victim of child abuse like my mom. I’ve always said that God sent him to me because there aren’t many women in the world who have been raised by an abused parent without having been abused themselves. Sean could not have married an abused person; he could not have married someone without the learned strategies for dealing with the symptoms. It had to be someone like me. Someone who had the knowledge without the baggage.

So let me tell you about that baggage. Like my mother, Sean has a switch. On a few occasions, I’ve had to restrain him from going after strangers as well. In fact, on one family vacation, I was sitting between my mom and my husband when a little girl came flying out of the restaurant in whose terrace we were dining. The little girl was about 3 or 4, and she was crying frantically. A split-second behind her came her mother, who looked like hell on wheels. She was furiously stalking her child out into the plaza, and when she caught up with her, she yanked that little girl right out of her shoes. Sean and Mom were on their feet in an instant, and I was clinging to their arms when the little girl’s father came to rescue his daughter from his overwrought wife.

Another odd and annoying bit of baggage from abuse has to do with food. Like my mom, Sean has myriad food “issues.” His abusive stepmother made chicken a lot. So chicken is a problem. If you’re a cook, you recognize what a major complication that is. Sean and my mom are both incredibly picky eaters. My 9-year-old is easier to cook for than either of them. I read an article that indicated many victims of child abuse have eating disorders because of the control factor. What they put into their mouths is one of the few things an abused child can control. They use it as a defensive weapon just as abusers will use it to punish them. Sean won’t eat peach-flavored foods, stewed tomatoes, cooked carrots and several other foods that he associates with his abuser.

Then there is the hypochondria. I read an article about this too. Abused children often develop it as a defense mechanism because many abusers will not be as violent if they believe their victim is already weakened from another source. I guess it takes the fun out of hitting the child. Nice, huh? Well, that hypochondria doesn’t go away when the child grows up and escapes the abuse. If you ask my mom or my husband how they’re feeling, they’ll give you a laundry list of ailments; their hair is falling out, their right earlobes are sore, their pancreas is twitchy, and their left toenails are loose - stuff like that. I try to be patient with that because sometimes, I swear I can see the 9-year-old version of my husband in his eyes when he is whining about not feeling good, and I remember that it’s not a character flaw. It’s a defense mechanism.

And that brings me to the elephant in the room, the person I have seen only once for about 5 seconds from a distance in the dark. The person I would most like to believe is reading this blog, but she won’t - my husband’s ex-step-mother. My letter to her:

Mrs. Whatever-Your-Last-Name-Is-Now (since you can’t get a husband to stay with you for long),

I’ve been dealing with the consequences of your cruelty for several years longer than you actually had the victim in your power. I believe your abuse of my husband lasted about seven years; I’ve been with him for over 14.

If you’ve actually read the preceding paragraphs, you can see some of the results of your abuse. In addition to having a hair-trigger reaction to bullies, difficult food phobias, and mild hypochondria, my husband is an agnostic. It’s a tribute to his logical mind and strength of character that he’s not a simple atheist.  I understand that one of your excuses for beating him was that you believed God wanted you to, but you were such a devout Christian, such an active church member, such a religious woman, no one would believe Sean’s stories. You told him he was evil and deserved the beatings you inflicted. Did you know that little boy used to pray every night, begging God to make him good so you’d stop hitting him? And when God didn’t answer in the way Sean expected, Sean decided He probably didn’t exist. Thanks for that, lady. I’m working every day to undo that bit of damage. Occasionally, I’ll feel like I’m making a tiny bit of progress, then Sean will hear Pat Robertson or some other televangelist make some ridiculously unkind pronouncement against an unfortunate bunch of people who obviously deserve their pain, and we’re right back. In those cases, he always mentions you. And when Sarah Palin was running for Vice President, he was reminded of you because of her illogical, holier-than-thou demeanor. I have to run interference, trying to live as a better example of a loving, forgiving CHRISTian than you or those other angry, paranoid posers so that Sean will perhaps, one day, forgive God for leaving him in your clutches for so long.

For all those reasons, your existence is often cursed in our home - by me, by my husband, sometimes even by our son, who is now old enough to understand the damage you did. In fact, your name is a code word in our family for “villain.” You are THE evil stepmother, the ogre, the wicked witch of all our bedtime stories. To speak your name, however, is to cast a pall over our home, so we don’t say it often. You’re the “Voldemort” of our family.

Yet, Sean, like my mom, is such a remarkable individual that he has chosen not to continue the cycle of abuse. He never touches our children in anger; he gets upset with me if I occasionally swat their behinds. Spanking is not a punishment in our home. He is a magnificent father, in spite of you. His children adore him. I know you cannot say the same of your children.

Sean has a great life. He has a good job that pays enough for me to work only part-time so I can stay home with our young kids. He has some terrific friends who think he’s brilliant and fun. He has two beautiful, healthy, smart, well-behaved children who think he hung the moon just for them. And he’s got me, his wife of 12 years. I believe that’s longer than any of your marriages have lasted, and we’re still going strong. I think he’s amazing. He’s a genius, did you know that? He’s smarter than I am, and I’m a National Merit Scholar, a college lecturer with 3 degrees, a published author. Sean blows me away intellectually. His family and friends continue to be impressed by his intelligence.

He’s kind too. Like the other men in the Mahoney family, he loves animals and has some weird cat attraction that brings every feline within a mile radius to our door. Like my mom, he won’t let any harm come to an animal or child if he can help it. His kindness is accompanied by bravery; for that reason, he’s the type of person bullies fear. Maybe that’s why my grandfather kept his distance on the three occasions he met Sean.

Sean has an amazing gift for sizing people up. He will meet someone new, and later in the evening, I’ll ask him, “What do you think of So-and-So?” And I always take his judgment to heart because he is always right. The people for whom he gets a bad first impression inevitably turn out to be unworthy of our friendship. If he doesn’t trust someone, we keep our children away them. Needless to say, you will never come near Sean’s kids.

Together, we have created the kind of rich life you can only envy from afar because people like you cannot manage it. We have a nice house full of love and laughter and happy memories. We take crazy family vacations to wonderful places like Disney World, the Black Hills, the Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon. We drive for hours together, and we enjoy each others’ company.

So the damage you inflicted on Sean, the damage my deceased grandfather inflicted on my mom, and the damage so many other abusers inflict on their victims has some lasting, annoying side effects. But the smart victims, the strong victims, the lucky victims get the last laugh. They get to choose the rest of their lives.  I have been blessed to witness the lives of my husband and my mom, two remarkable people who are so much better than you, it seems a shame they have to share the same planet with you. You will never be as loved as they are.

May God have mercy on your twisted soul.

Jennifer Price Mahoney

I have to admit it: the Tea Party knows how to get attention.

It certainly has mine. They scare me to death!

I’ve been listening to their rhetoric since long before they “organized,” and it has always creeped me out. See, I’m surrounded by right-wing conservatives. I live in Indiana. My parents are Republicans, and many of their friends are even more right-leaning than they are. They are all concerned that I no longer share their views. They are certain I’ve been brain-washed, although by whom, they aren’t sure. Probably all those academic elitists I work with at the university, even though I actually started moving away from the GOP when I was working for a very conservative financial services company. Anyway, to counteract the scary liberal influences that have drawn me from the path of righteousness, they send me e-mails, talk down to me as directed by Ann Coulter and shake their heads at my responses.

I’ve shared a few of these e-mails on this blog before, but I don’t think I’ve ever documented the ridiculous phone “conversation” I had with a friend of my mother. I was at my parents’ house, and the phone rang. I picked it up and said hello. When my mom’s friend realized it was me, she proceeded to spend the next several minutes explaining to me that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, Barack Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist, and all the media outlets except Fox are run by Muslims. Oh, and Obama is the anti-Christ. I called my mother to the phone.

So now, my mom’s crazy friend and thousands of other older, white, middle-class folks like her have put together these “tea parties.” Just the name annoys me. I have lovely little tea parties with my 4-year-old where we dress up and use my good wedding china and eat tiny sandwiches and drink tea. It’s very civilized and sweet. Nothing about today’s tea parties is civilized or sweet. I know that they are trying to make some vague connection to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, but their logic is not working for me.

The 1773 Boston Tea Party was a demonstration against an imperial power. The colonists were unhappy that the king, a monarch who was not elected by anyone, was taxing them from across an ocean without their having any representation in the British Parliament. Their rallying cry was “No Taxation Without Representation!” Well, aside from the fact that today’s Tea Partiers do not live in a colony ruled by a remote monarchy, there is also the problem that the taxes to which they are opposed were passed by duly elected representatives. This is taxation WITH representation. (Although, to be honest, I haven’t actually seen any of these taxes yet.)
But they don’t like it. They say THEY didn’t vote for the people passing these laws, so they haven’t been represented. Newsflash, Tea Party folk: just because it’s a representative democracy, doesn’t mean your side always wins. Thank goodness.

So they gather in public squares and parks and scream inflammatory rhetoric about God and guns and gangsters (”Tea Party Rally Upbraids ‘Gangster’ Government,” Associated Press, 4/15/10). “I’m clinging to my guns, my religion and my ammunition,” exclaims one Republican candidate at a recent protest. Really? God and guns? I’m sorry, but I must’ve missed that part of the New Testament where Jesus advocated violent overthrow of the Roman occupiers. Or where he told his followers NOT to pay taxes. What I remember is: “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” Which sounds a lot to me like: “Pay your taxes and quit complaining. You can’t take it with you to Heaven anyway!”

Tea Partiers insist they aren’t violent or extreme; they’re just good Christian Americans upholding their rights. Patrolling the perimeters of tea party rallies in camouflage, carrying AK-47s to defend the protest against “the left-wing nut jobs out there” (”Tea Party Rally Upbraids ‘Gangster’ Government,” Associated Press, 4/15/10). I’m sorry, who are the gangsters again?

These people frighten me because they are inordinately, illogically angry. And they have guns. Big guns that they like to wave in people’s faces. Not a good combination.

It doesn’t make sense that they are this angry NOW. If they really are upset about the federal debt, why didn’t they love Clinton? Why didn’t they demonstrate against George W. Bush who took Clinton’s $236 billion surplus and turned it into a trillion-dollar deficit by playing fast and loose with the accounting for the Iraq War.

If they’re angry about gun rights, why take it out on Obama who has not proposed a single gun control bill?

If they’re angry about their Constitutional rights, why didn’t have a hissy fit over Bush’s warrantless wiretapping or suspension of habeas corpus?

What really changed to make them so angry? Well, I’m just judging from my own experience with these folks, and that is a dangerous thing to do. Extrapolating from your own narrow experience can often lead to logical fallacies. Stupid stuff like: “It’s snowing here in Cincinnati in March, so global warming is a hoax.” So reader, beware, the following is just my opinion, but here are the changes I see.
First, the recession. I could blame it on George W. Bush or the Republican Congress, but it’s more complicated than that, and its causes don’t really matter here. It happened, and the recession changed a lot of things. It made people unhappy and anxious.

Second, the Democratic Congress. Most of the Tea Partiers are current or former GOP voters. They don’t trust Democrats in Congress, even if they haven’t done much with their power. A Democratic Congress makes these people upset.

Third, a Democratic president. Most of the Tea Partiers did not vote for Barack Obama. These people lost the election. They did not share our joy when he walked into Millennium Park on election night. Losing makes most people angry.

Finally, a black president. There’s just no getting around it. The first African-American president is a big change for our nation, and a lot of people are furious about it. Now you can make some pie-in-the-sky argument about how his race has nothing to do with the anger of the Tea Partiers, but before you do, take a look at Stormfront.org. If you’re not familiar with this group, consider yourself lucky. They are a white supremacist group that happens to own the domain rights to martinlutherking.org, a website I have used for years when teaching my students about information literacy and the dangers of believing everything you read on the Internet. Obviously, Stormfront hates President Obama. But they have of other things in common with the Tea Party - love of guns, distrust of the government in general, hatred of taxes.

Now my conservative and libertarian friends hate it when this race issue comes up, but the fact remains: I have yet to see a black person at a Tea Party rally. Show me three. Not just one token, but three separate people of color at a Tea Party function. Then maybe I’ll be less anxious about this situation.

According to one Tea Party activist, “”We don’t want to be misrepresented, whether it’s by someone who is not part of the group and has their own agenda, or whether it’s by some fringe extremist who may actually be a racist” (”Tea Party Leaders Anxious About Extremists,” Associated Press, 4/15/10). So the Tea Partiers are anxious? Good. I have a bit of advice for them: “Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation” - George Washington.

If your message appeals to racists and militias and crazy fringe groups, maybe the problem is the message itself. Stop using this frightening rhetoric. Stop waving your guns around. Stop threatening our duly elected officials and throwing rocks through their windows like a bunch of Nazi brownshirts during Kristellnacht (”Former militiaman unapologetic for calls to vandalize offices over healthcare,” Washington Post, 3/25/10). Engage in the democratic process established by the founding fathers you claim to revere. Follow their example. Go ahead. But not just by hanging tea bags to your hats and calling yourselves “modern Sons of Liberty.” Be really brave and engage in the dialogue. Civilly. And preferably, without an AK-47.

I’ve had so many ideas for blog entries lately, they’ve kind of created a logjam in my brain. So rather than try to work all these ideas out into separate pieces, I’m just gonna toss them, raw, onto a page. Once I get the backup cleared out, maybe I’ll be able to see what’s really worthy of more consideration?

1. Daylight Savings Time sucks. The only people who like it seem to be golfers and people from New England. All it does for me is give me an extra hour in the evenings to fight with my kids and try to get them to bed.

2. The NCAA basketball tourney is almost here! Even though my beloved Indiana Hoosiers will not be playing, I will have my Butler Bulldogs who are playing great ball right now. I will also follow Purdue, just because they are an Indiana school and many of friends attended there. I have to admit, though, the spanking the Boilermakers endured yesterday at the hands of Minnesota was kind of fun to watch. Purdue had just 4 points 15 minutes into the game. Did my IU Hoosier heart good. hee hee hee

3. Rush Limbaugh says he is moving to Costa Rica if the health care reform bill goes through. SWEET! Not only will we get some health care reform, but we’ll get rid of that windbag too?! I teared up at the very thought. Rather ironic, though, that he’d choose to escape to Costa Rica, which has had socialized medicine for over half a century and still manages to have some of the finest health care in the world, as well as a longer life expectancy than the U.S.. I guess Rush doesn’t mind universal health care for himself, just for his fellow Americans.

4. Home schooling seems to becoming an epidemic. When I was a kid, I did not know a single home-schooled child. Now I know 20. It worries me for a several reasons. One, I have a Master’s in English, and I still do not feel qualified to teach my children all subjects. Two, I teach just one class of 16 students, and it takes a huge amount of time to prepare. How are home-schooling parents giving the same quality of education to their kids with their limited time? Three, I have had home-schooled kids in my college classes; they are smart, but they are also backward, shy, and overwhelmed. Four, many of the home-schooling parents seem to think that public schools are liberal indoctrination centers. Having grown up surrounded by my high school teacher mom and ALL her public school teacher friends, I can assure you that public school teachers are, in general, some of the most politically conservative folks I know. And did you read about the good ol’ Texas Board of Education’s textbook standards that will help dictate curriculum for the entire nation? Fear not, right-wing conservatives; your values are safely in the hands of Texas. Another thing that kind of cracks me up about the home-schooling phenomenon is that I hear so many of these parents saying, “Well, little Timmy really needs more one-on-one attention.” Most of the time, I think little Timmy needs less! A lot less! Maybe little Timmy is an immature brat because he thinks he is the center of the universe. Put him in a classroom with 25 of the other 6.4 billion human beings and let him get a sense of his real place in the universe. Finally, home-schooling tends to perpetuate the worrisome trend of people who refuse to allow their beliefs to be challenged. People who watch only Fox News because it tells them what they want to hear also tend to home school their kids so they can teach them only what they want them to be taught. This kind of thought vacuum (and it goes both ways: liberals do it too) is not conducive to democratic discourse.

5. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg is an idiot. All the problems in New York City and he picks a  battle with salt? Really? Does this mean you won’t be able to get pickles or corned beef in NYC anymore? Sometimes, I can really appreciate the Libertarians’ perspective.

6. American Terrorists seem to be popping up like mushrooms all over the world. Two of them who have made the biggest headlines are women - marginalized, abused, isolated women. Hell hath no fury? Or is it something bigger than just their gender? So often these days, we see some loner (male or female) just walk into or fly their plane into some institution they believe has been victimizing them and wreak havoc. I think part of it goes back to that self-perpetuating “thought vacuum” that is part of my home-schooling concern. It also seems to be symptomatic of our American society, where technology may bring us together, but it also paints us into corners. Just this week, I was standing at a busy corner on campus, surrounded by students. Three were talking on their cell phones, two were texting, and another was listening to his MP3 player. No one made eye contact with the people standing inches from them. No one said “thank you” to the kid who pressed the crosswalk button; he wouldn’t have heard anyway because he was wearing headphones. What happens to the people who have cell phones but no one to text? What happens to the folks with computers but no real friends? Maybe they turn into domestic or foreign terrorists?

7. Hugo Chavez is the Fidel Castro of my generation - a charismatic South American nutjob who I would really like to see just go away. Or at least shut up.

8. Poor Corey Haim. Dead at 38. A has-been at 20. Maybe that’s why the jokes about him started about 5 minutes after the news of his death hit the web. That should be everyone’s nightmare: to spend half your life chasing the brief success of your childhood and to be mocked before your corpse is even cold.

9. The Oscars were really lame this year. Don’t get me wrong: seeing a woman finally win the Best Director award was awesome, but the rest of the show was long and lame. I guess it didn’t help that I’d seen only 4 of the nominated films: Julie/Julia, Harry Potter, Up, and The Princess and the Frog. Movies are just not worth the money and aggravation to me anymore. Why pay $30 to sit in a theater with people who talk through the whole film? I guess I’m getting old and crotchety, huh?

Well, that’s it. My brain feels unclogged which is a relief. Looking back over this, I guess I can’t avoid the home-schooling thing. It’s probably going to cost me a few friends/acqaintances, though. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they won’t read it. I think I’ll also have to explore the whole self-perpetuation “thought vacuum” thing more broadly too: how the vast variety of cable and internet media lets us pick and choose our facts, and how technology isolates us from each other and the challenges that “others” present to our worldviews. *sigh* Those are pretty hefty topics. I think I’ll tackle them after March Madness ends. And I’ll have all that extra daylight to do it in. Stupid DST.*mutter* *mutter*

This weekend’s been busy for my family. We attended an Indiana Pacers game Friday night to support a friend who was performing in the pre-game show and sat with her friends and family. Yesterday afternoon, we went to a farewell party for my former boss and saw many of former co-workers I hadn’t seen in ages. Last night, my husband took me out to dinner for my birthday. Since we didn’t have to pick the kids up for a while, we spent about an hour in the restaurant bar, talking to a couple of other patrons and the very funny bartender.

None of this is extraordinary, except that during these various events, people once again made the assumption that I was, of course, politically conservative. With Super Tuesday looming, the conversations seemed to turn toward politics – nationalized health care, the environment, foreign policy, and the Iraq War which the Bush administration has done such a complete job of spinning, it HAD to be accompanied by talk of 9/11.

Since these were all social events and I was surrounded by people whom I like very much, I held my tongue most of the time. I politely smiled and nodded while my very sweet husband, who is far more conservative than I am in most ways, tried to come to my defense, pointing out the more egregious flaws in their assertions as kindly as he could

The long and short of it is – I’ve spent the whole weekend silently mulling over all this crap. And today, as I was doing the breakfast dishes and preparing for tonight’s Super Bowl party, I found myself singing an old George Michael song. All his silly antics aside, Michael’s a pretty good musician, and this song is one of my favorites. It took me a while to realize that this song has been stuck in my head all weekend, and it says all the stuff I wanted to say in a beautiful and kind way that I would never have been able to manage. The song is off his “Listen Without Prejudice” CD from 1990. Even almost 20 years later, the lyrics are hauntingly relevant:

These are the days of the open hand
They will not be the last
Look around now
These are the days of the beggars and the choosers

This is the year of the hungry man
Whose place is in the past
Hand in hand with ignorance
And legitimate excuses

The rich declare themselves poor
And most of us are not sure
If we have too much
But we’ll take our chances
Because God’s stopped keeping score
I guess somewhere along the way
He must have let us all out to play
Turned his back and all God’s children
Crept out the back door

And it’s hard to love, there’s so much to hate
Hanging on to hope
When there is no hope to speak of
And the wounded skies above say it’s much, much too late
Well maybe we should all be praying for time

These are the days of the empty hand
Oh, you hold on to what you can
And charity is a coat you wear twice a year

This is the year of the guilty man
Your television takes a stand
And you find that what was over there is over here

So you scream from behind your door
Say “What’s mine is mine and not yours.
I may have too much but I’ll take my chances
Because God’s stopped keeping score.”

And you cling to the things they sold you
Did you cover your eyes when they told you
That he can’t come back
Because he has no children to come back for?

It’s hard to love, there’s so much to hate
Hanging on to hope
When there is no hope to speak of
And the wounded skies above say it’s much too late
So maybe we should all be praying for time

-         “Praying for Time” by George Michael 1990

Amen.

When I was a kid, there was only one holiday. THE holiday. Christmas. Presents. Santa. Presents. Food. Presents. Parties. Presents. It was all about December 25th.

Then I grew up, got married and had kids of my own.

Christmas is now one of my least favorite holidays. It’s just way too hard. All the decorating, the baking, the shopping, the wrapping, the get-togethers. And it’s all gotta sparkle magically. Argh.
At this point in my life, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Think about it. It’s the perfect holiday.

1. No decorating required. Now I do a bit of autumn/Thanksgiving decorating, but it’s not a lot. Takes me about 15 minutes to change my dining room tablecloth and centerpiece, add some turkey, corn, pumpkin and scarecrow decorations to my living room, and we’re appropriately festive.

2.  No gifts to select, hunt down, purchase, hide and wrap. No e-mails back and forth to find out what Uncle Joe wants this year. No Amazon wish lists. No breaking the family budget to buy little Timmy the X-Box he’ll die without. No racing out at some ridiculous hour to fight psychotic shoppers over the last X-Box at Wal-Mart at the fabulous sale price that will save you $20.

3. No insanely long list of holiday activities that we must complete or risk breaking ages-old family tradition, thus emotionally scarring little Timmy and Janie for their lives.

4. No exclusion. I can wish anyone and everyone a happy Thanksgiving 100% worry-free. Anybody I encounter anywhere can participate if they want. Thanksgiving’s not a Christian holiday, a Jewish holiday, a Muslim holiday, a black or white or lovers’ or Irish-American or anything else. Even my foreign students enjoy the time off and seem to regard Thanksgiving as a quaint, harmless tradition.

A few of my non-American students were curious about my family’s customs and seemed bemused by my answers. They wanted to know what we do on this day of giving thanks. That’s what made me realize why I love this holiday so much. What do we do?  Well, we cook, we eat, we watch football and nap. What could be better than that?

If you think Christmas is better, more power to you. Enjoy the beginning of your season, marked by the doorbuster, pre-dawn sales at department stores around the country. I’ll be in bed, sleeping off my turkey binge.

Happy Thanksgiving!