Thanksgiving 2015

I remember last Thanksgiving, I was sitting right here at my kitchen island, drinking bourbon and listening to a Charlie Pride record, cooking something or other, and preparing to write a holiday post for Viva El Birdos.

Well, here we are, a year older but no wiser, really, and without an exciting new Jason Heyward (or even the exciting Jason Heyward we already had), over which to hyperventilate, and on a Thanksgiving morning baseball seems so very far away.

This year it's Four Roses in my glass, and I just finished pouring cranberry sauce into a copper mold, popping it into the refrigerator to set. I should have done it last night, but didn't. It should still have plenty of time to set up. Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything is spinning away merrily on the turntable, and while I'm enjoying it, I am also considering getting up and changing over to something seasonal. Elvis's Christmas record, perhaps, or one of the True Value Hardware Happy Holidays records I've accumulated over the years. It just now occurred to me that's a weird thing to collect, and have spent dozens of hours overall searching for. Oh, well.

The year is 2015, and today is Thanksgiving. I hope you all have a lovely one, wherever you are and whatever you're doing. Feel free to drop by here throughout the day if you need an escape from family obligations or the onslaught of tryptophan; this will be the sole thread to go up today. I don't expect any baseball news on the holiday.

You can always do the thing we do most years, giving thanks for whatever you like. Myself, I'll just be thankful preemptively for the surprisingly reasonable contracts Jason Heyward and David Price are preparing to sign with the Redbirds. And also that this most recent handoff of our more or less benevolent dictatorship here happened with less strife and outright bloodshed than the last time the captaincy was changed. Though we'll always have four days of Mike Grabowski as a uniting force, those of us who lived through it, I suppose, in the way Sega Dreamcast owners mark each other, members of a club they never meant to join, but are fiercely loyal to all the same.

Happy Thanksgiving, VEB. Be careful, be happy, and say a little prayer over your turkey for our offseason hopes.