COLUMN Holt's Harangue

Author: Christian Holt

Honestly, Thanksgiving was a bad idea. It boils my noodle to think that our government had to sit down and approve this as a national holiday. In the days of yore, some ancient senator (probably a contemporary of Reagan) had to have proclaimed, "Hey! Let's make a holiday where distant relatives come together for one meal so that they can realize why they don't live together to begin with." The other congressmen all mumbled their approval. I mean, it sounded like a good idea. Or maybe it was intended as some sick joke. Either way, they ran with it.
One congressman then added, "And let's make sure we center the holiday over a really stupid kind of food!" This put in motion the wheels of legislation. Congress appointed a committee to figure out what kind of silly food Americans would feast on.
After many months of debate in Congress, two factions emerged. Many Congressmen advocated the guava as the food for the new holiday. But the carnivore union was very powerful and lobbied for the turkey. The guava clearly had the majority, but Floridians cast the last votes, and so the turkey won.
After Thanksgiving, we have the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Shopping season officially begins when the referee fires the starting gun. Then hundreds of parents, still legally insane from the psychoactive substance in turkey, storm the malls like rats on cheese.
This day is colorfully referred to as "Black Friday." But shopping is a nice break from the family bickering. Instead, one bickers with people you don't even know, usually over Pokemon and Furbees (reasonably discounted by .005 percent). People actually don't know what they buy during this time period. I'm convinced that the turkey does something to their brains. My mom bought me four cashmere sweaters, a pony and a phone de-tangler one Black Friday.
I was not immune to this universal homage to the mall. My mother wanted my help in shopping for my little cousins. They are boys, ages six and nine, and since I'm the only other boy on that side of the family, I got the job. Going into a toy store, I was shocked. The walls were not decorated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, My Little Ponies or GI Joes. No, instead stuffed animals and action figures that actually moved decorated the walls.
That's right, they moved ... by themselves. Like something out of a Wes Craven movie, the toys were alive with the holiday spirit. Some of them sung, some of them danced, and some of them had really big googily eyes. Call me old-fashioned, but I miss those My Little Ponies and Ninja Turtles. Back in the day we imagined that we had toys that could fly and shoot laser beams out of their eyes. But with modern technology, they actually can. Some of these toys double as miniature power generators, so that they can jump-start your car if need be.
I couldn't purchase any of these toys for my cousins, I was so afraid of them. Some of these toys probably are smarter than me. And I don't like that. What's to stop them from replacing me with an identical mechanical version of me? Nothing! Good Lord, they could make toy robot replicas of all of us ... In our turkey-hocked states, what is to stop them? Now I can only look at Al Gore and wonder ...