“Three Thanksgivings ago I was at a friend’s house in San Francisco (who’d struggled mightily to accommodate two vegans, a dairy allergy, a wheat allergy (mine) and an allergy to nuts among her seven guests) One of the guests (vegan) went on for the entire meal about what a despicable holiday Thanksgiving was, a celebration of imperialism, the subordination of the laborers who’d planted, irrigated, and harvested the vegetables and fed and slaughtered the turkey, etc., an exhortation to consume, an advocacy of carnivorousness, boy did the sanctimonious bore go on, I nearly fricasseed her. And then there was this Christmas dinner a few years ago where there were two Mormons, two pagans and two atheists. It sounds like a joke, right? ‘A Mormon, a Pagan and an Atheist sat down to Christmas dinner.’ The first argument erupted over the proper way to say grace. And, as you might imagine, it was
