Thanks for mutton

Dear Thanksgiving: You’re great. But you made me feel like I was going to rip apart in a violent explosion of entrails and cranberry jelly. Do it again and I’ll kill you in your sleep. Love Jeff.

So reads my imaginary letter to a holiday. I can forgive Christmas its commercialization, and Easter its sheer pointlessness. But with me and Thanksgiving, it’s personal. There’s no other holiday that so brings out the masochist in me; no other at which I feel compelled to cram massive amounts of bird meat into my mouth and see how long it takes to slip into a coma.

Yeah, I know. Self-control. I should exercise it. But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it? Especially seated at a table shimmering in the heat of some of the most heavenly food ever concocted – to make no mention of the various pies and desserts, devised to send reckless souls to early graves with their unbearable goodness.
If there was ever a holiday that has evolved as a monument to gluttony, Thanksgiving is it.

Which is not to dump on it and strip it of its obvious merits. Take my most recent Thanksgiving, for example: A fine dinner at a lake house in Monmouth overlooking Tacoma, with family, football, and just enough alcohol so I wouldn’t mind the slobbering of the dog licking gravy off my fingers. That’s all good stuff. And it’s only stuff that could happen on that particular holiday – unless you’re one of those families that has postcard-perfect fireside dinners all the time, in which case I’d like to marry your daughter.

I’d just like to retain all of that heart-warming goodness and subtract the aching stomach and too-tight Wranglers. It’s a deceptively challenging assignment.

Two reasons.

First and foremost, there’s the food selection. Is it me, or has the spread become larger and more complex over the years? Every autumn, a couple of friends of mine host an event they call “Thanksgiving II” – which is kind of like Thanksgiving I, only a group of buddies all bring their leftovers and set about the task of clearing space in various refrigerators. Since each friend’s Thanksgiving I meal is slightly different, the Thanksgiving II meal is a hodgepodge of hors d’oeuvres and side dishes: Green bean casserole, applesauce, banana bread, zucchini bread, bread bread, and pasta salad take their place alongside the traditional trimmings. Afterward, various desserts rule the day – enough to send us all crawling back to our cars, pleading for a swift and merciful death.

Thanksgiving II has turned into a wonderful tradition, but the sheer volume of edibles illustrates how overeating has almost become a requirement of the holiday. You can’t face a table stocked with fifteen or twenty dishes and not sample them all. (Ridiculous!) The temptation is too great.

But if selection makes it hard to not overeat, it’s nothing next to food addiction.

That sounds like a strange phenomenon, and I’ll admit, even after seeing stories on food addiction run on 60 Minutes and in the Los Angeles Times, I was skeptical. How can you be addicted to something that you legitimately need in order to survive? But the science is sound: Certain foods, especially desserts, trigger dopamine production in the brain, not unlike what occurs when an alcoholic takes a drink, or when Rush Limbaugh passes a CVS pharmacy. And the revelation that two-thirds of Americans are overweight lends credence to the idea that, yeah, sometimes we can’t help ourselves.

In light of that, inviting a food addict to Thanksgiving dinner is rather like inviting an alcoholic to a kegger, or a cocaine addict to Charlie Sheen’s house. Even without an addiction to food, a meal that size amounts to a kind of punishment – a consignment to the treadmill, the sweatpants with the elastic waistband, or in extreme cases, the Maury Povich show.

Because of our commitment to indulgence, we often lose sight of what the holiday is about: Expressing thanks for the things that are positive in our lives. This year, among other things, I was thankful to have a button on my pants that could be undone. It’s not a solution to the food dilemma, but boy, does it help.