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.
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