Thanksgiving is coming, and that means someone- maybe you- is hosting dinner. You get no sympathy from this journalist, who lives near Plymouth, Massachusetts in a town founded by Myles Standish. I host every year, no question. Big ol'
Catholic family, too. Local turkeys know my name and fear me.
Cooking for crowds is always hectic and is rarely fun. All you can do is set out a ton of food and keep the alcohol flowing. That is how it works on SL, as well.
Avatars don't need to eat. We're not gigapets, and you could starve your avatar for years without her losing a pound. Eating is something you do for grins on SL. That said, you should try to do it well when you do it.
This goes double when it is Thanksgiving. You most likely eat with real people on Thanksgiving, but you may be on SL later in the day. You may even end up hosting an SL Thanksgiving party, and people coming to that party are going to be expecting turkey, gravy, cranberry sauce and all that other good stuff. You can f**k around on Easter and Christmas
with roast beef or ham... but in November, you'd better be bringin' the
Gobbler. If not, I can't even do business with you.
Since avatars don't need food, that leads to supply/demand problems when looking to layout a turkey dinner spread in your SL home or business. Even if you find a friggin' turkey, good luck finding butternut squash or green bean casserole. There may be a potato farm sim somewhere, and some other sim might have a cranberry bog, but you're
eventually going to hit a wall somewhere on the menu if you try to score the ingredients individually.
Fortunately, the good people at the Food Connection have taken care
of all that for you. You can go in, drop what I believe is 200 Ls and
have a big huge table with all the Thanksgiving necessities. Turkey,
mashed potatoes, corn, sweet potato pie, stuffing, some green thing that
I assume is associated with Southern sorts of Thanksgiving, cranberry
sauce, rolls, carrots and all the other stuff that Charlie Brown didn't
come up with in his Thanksgiving special dinner.
A few facts on certain Thanksgiving menu items that will let you DOMINATE the dinner table conversation:
- Turkeys are not indigenous to the nation of Turkey. They are native, and were at one time unique, to North America. The Spanish sold
them to Arab merchants, and the bird was introduced to Europe via
Turkish markets. They have been common holiday fare in Europe since The 1600s. In the classic story A Christmas Carol, Scrooge springs for a turkey as he redeems himself.
- "Cranberry sauce" is what John Lennon says at the end of Strawberry Fields Forever.
He liked nonsense words in his song, and he thought "cranberry sauce"
sounded funny. I have read that he detested the stuff. Many misheard the lyric as "I buried Paul," and the Paul Is Dead rumors gained steam.
- The Irish became so dependent on potatoes that, when a blight hit
Irish spuds in the 1840s, the resulting famine killed 25% of the Irish
population.
- Stephen King originally handed his publisher a story called Children Of The Asparagus, but his agent talked him into using Corn. OK, I made that up.
- People in the southern US, bitter over losing the Civil War,
viewed Pumpkin Pie as a symbol of Yankee culture and refused to serve
it. Sweet Potato Pie was substituted into holiday menus in the former
Confederate states.
- Green Bean Casserole was invented by the Campbell's Soup people and is the major mover of Cream of Mushroom Soup. Dorcas Riley headed the group that invented it. Cranberry Sauce was invented by Ocean Spray, a
Massachusetts cranberry conglomerate. The same guy that introduced cranberry sauce to America also invented Cranapple and various cocktails such as the Cape Codder, the Madras, the Sea Breeze, the Cosmopolitan, and- no joke- roll-on deodorant.
- The original spread at the first Thanksgiving was waterfowl, venison, lobster, clams, berries, fruit, pumpkin, and squash.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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