By Oddly Robbie

Moving to Spain taught me something unexpected:

I don’t miss Thanksgiving.

Not the food.

Not the ritual.

Not the heavy kitchen marathon that somehow passes as a holiday.

Here’s the honest breakdown:

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🍗 Turkey: The Once-a-Year Bird

The national centerpiece that almost nobody truly enjoys.

Before cooking: strange smell, cold bird, moral hesitation.

During cooking: hours of basting, waiting, and meat-fog drifting through the house.

After cooking: dry white meat, greasy dark meat, and flavors we only tolerate out of tradition.

If turkey were actually good, we’d eat it more than once a year.

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🥣 Gravy: A Liquid Heartache

A potion of fat, flour, and panic whisking.

It tastes cozy for five seconds and then sits in your chest like a regret.

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🍠 Yams: Dessert Pretending to Be a Vegetable

Too sweet. Odd texture. Confused identity.

A once-a-year obligation more than a food.

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🥧 Pumpkin Pie: The Annual Experiment

Everyone pretends it’s amazing, but nobody craves it in March.

It only survives when buried under ice cream or a mountain of whipped cream.

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🍞 Stuffing: Bread Having an Identity Crisis

Moist bread? Dry bread? Seasoned bread fat?

It never decides.

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🍒 Cranberry Sauce: Sour, Sour, and… More Sour

A jiggling red mystery. Somewhere between jelly, jam, and alien lifeform.

First taste: sour.

Second taste: really sour.

Third taste: emergency water.

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🫒 Black Olives: The Childhood MVP

Ten olives. Ten fingertips. Pop-pop-pop.

A toy disguised as food — and somehow the highlight of the whole plate.

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😴 Then Comes the Food Coma

Once the plates are cleared, the room slows:

Eyes droop. Voices fade. Couches swallow people whole.

This is real biology — postprandial somnolence, the classic food coma.

Heavy carbs + fats + sugar + overeating = shutdown mode.

Some don’t “survive” it literally.

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☀️ Spain Doesn’t Come With Any of This

No turkey fog.

No sugary vegetables.

No once-a-year pies.

No emergency chaser for cranberry regret.

Just daily, simple, beautiful food with flavor you actually want — and no obligation to pretend otherwise.

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📜 The Gratitude Disguise

Let’s speak clearly:

Thanksgiving isn’t just about food. It’s about ritualized forgetting.

It’s a harvest feast built on a genocide.

While we rehearse paper pilgrim hats and cornucopia crafts, the truth sits silent and inconvenient:

• That the same Mayflower passengers who feasted were also the architects of stolen land, broken treaties, and systemic erasure.

• That Native communities who welcomed strangers were repaid with warfare, smallpox, and centuries of policy masquerading as civilization.

• That we teach our children gratitude — but surgically omit accountability.

• That we celebrate survival — but ignore the price others paid for it.

It’s not memory.

It’s myth.

And myths that don’t tell the whole truth become weapons.

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So no, I don’t miss Thanksgiving.

Not even a little.

Not the food.

Not the fog.

And not the fantasy that calls itself history.

I’ll keep my olives, my sunshine, and my life here instead.

I’ll give thanks every day — not once a year — and I’ll do it without dancing on the history we refuse to face.

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Thanksgiving? No gracias.

Truth? Always.

So happy Thanksgiving!  Just kidding. 

This is Oddly Robbie