Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Thanksgiving is about green jello.


What? You think this looks like a booger dressed as Saturn for Halloween? You're wrong. This, gentle readers, is green jello.

Every year for Thanksgiving MDH gets out the china that Grandmommy Dearest bought one piece at a time from Woolworth's for thirty thousand years before finally accumulating a full set. Every year, FDH prepares MASS QUANTITIES OF FOOD that no one can finish. And every year, MDH prepares green jello (which, incidentally, no one can finish either).

Green jello is to Thanksgiving what mystery meat is to hot lunch. Green jello also comes in orange, in which guise it is called "orange jello." No living Joo outside MDH's sibling group eats green jello. Its composition is uncertain. Sure, it has jello in it. But its other contents are as disputed as the Da Vinci Code. Still, much like a drunk uncle to whom no one speaks directly for fear he may begin discussing his left testicle (mutilated during the war), green jello is a Thanksgiving fixture.

And so, it is in the presence of green jello each year that the Joo family carries out another thanksgiving tradition. Each Joo at the Thanskgiving table expresses in turn that which he or she is thankful for. After packing children, dogs, clothing, medication, and adult homework into the cars, filling tanks of gas, traveling miles and miles to reach the House of Joo Childhood, and preparing graceful refusals of the green jello in advance, sometimes it's hard for each Joo to express thanks. But, on this holiday, when we have A and B and MDH sans cancer, this Joo thinks we should all express thanks for the green jello (or your family's equivalent) and the chance to teach A and B (substitute your children's initials here) to abhor it. That is, after all, what Thanksgiving is all about.

2 comments:

  1. Cheers to that, two joos!

    And, from one west michigander to you two mid-staters, LOTS of people outside MDH's sibling group will be facing the colored jello tomorrow. My extended family considers Jello a whole separate food group, one which must be taken into account when planning potlucks, as in: Main course? Check (casserole). Vegetable? Check (green bean casserole). Bread? Check. Salad (iceberg lettuce)? Check. Jello salad? Check. It comes in green with pineapple, orange with mandarin oranges, red with pears (!), red with pretzels (!!!), and, for Christmas, "ribbon Jello" which is extra-special and contains every color of jello in thin layers.

    Apparently, I could go on about this Jello thing at some length . . . and I just have.

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  2. Stephanie, I never want to read that much about Jello again. And by "never", I mean:


    PRETZELS FOR FUCE'S SAKE?

    That hurt my soul.

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