Thanksgiving is a pretty boring holiday by a lot of people's standards. Almost every American schoolkid knows the origins of Thanksgiving--a bunch of pilgrims came over on a ship, called the Mayflower, came to the New World (U.S.), starved, and were eventually rescued by the Native Americans. There was a feast, some Native American chief brought ninety or so men, and killed five deer, etc. That is the story of Thanksgiving, summarized version. Unfortunately, Thanksgiving seems to be an All-American holiday. Okay, it has roots in the mistreatment and persecution of the pilgrims in England. But it's not creepily ancient like Halloween, with origins steeped in the magical mystery of druids and etc. The one great thing about Thanksgiving is the food. I am not remotely ashamed to say this but the only thing I was pretty much thankful for on Halloween--no excuse me, the only thing I was conciously thankful for--was the great food. I'm always thankful for the fact I have a laptop computer, the fact I don't have to go to a horrifically boring regular school and do banal cut-out construction paper excercises, but I don't think about things like this all the time. My--no, our--Thanksgiving was quite the event of the month. My dad wore himself out marinating duck, mashing garlic, cooking cranky cranberries with a bunch of the rest of the fruit shoved up into our freezer, mashing sweet potatoes, cooking rice (actually my sister did that), making shrimp salad, cooking salmon, making eggs-in-tea (a Chinese delicacy, which, in my opinion, makes the outside of the egg taste bitter and horrible)...We also baked a bunch of mini-quiches, bought in bulk from Costco. I am addicted to these quiches and I can devour around twelve at a time--on Thanksgiving I ate around six. This filled up a great deal of my already bulging stomach and I had to force myself to eat rice, shrimp, sweet potato, and the delicious cold cranberry sauce. For dessert we had pumpkin pie, rhubarb and strawberry pie, and apple crisp pie, as well as French Vanilla Dreyer's Ice cream. I ate some more later. We also played the game Cranium. I was the captain of the losing team--my sister was the captain of the winning team. They were two spaces ahead of us and, since our Cranium was a turbo edition, acquired one or two more cards than us, before us. And even if I didn't eat very much, there was always leftovers.