** This article will be published in the 11/16 Edition of the Seward Journal Newspaper **

As I write this, Thanksgiving is two weeks away.  I am, or was, super excited about having my family all in the same place for the festivities. After Tuesday, however, I think festivities is a rather generous expectation for the day. The best analogy I can come up for the proceedings is the past week on social media, specifically Facebook. If you think about it, Facebook is just a giant Thanksgiving dinner table. Think about it, all of your friends and family are going to be there along with at least a few people only one other person knows. Everyone is listening to all the conversations and, for better or worse, looking to jump in on one. Undoubtedly, someone will lead with a prayer meme before everybody goes around throwing up memes about what they’re thankful for. After that comes the food pictures and recipie discussions. Maybe you’ll get pleseant conversation about the kids, which leads to one person gushing about their job and everyone else complaning heartily about theirs. Eventually though, the politics memes start. It’s going to start subtly by someone tossing out a funny meme about the candidate they didn’t support, which they also imagine, incorrectly, everyone else will find funny too. Then there’s a response, and the whole dinner table starts to roll down hill until, eventually, at least two people are shouting and the rest of us are chasing the wine to the bottom of the bottle, and reaching for the liquor cabinet. At the end of it someone will throw their hands up and storm out, with the standard, ‘I’m taking a break from Facebook for a while’, and a few others will walk away from the proceedings and go back to posting about the Seahawks again.

This year, that’s where we’re at, pretty much all of us, I think. I’m super optimistic that after already reaching the point of angry red-faced shouting on Facebook, everyone knows to not bring up politics for even a second, it’s a slippery slope. In any case, if it does get there, because it will, I’ve got the perfect recipie that you can knock up by just throwing ingredients into a blender. 

What you need:

– 1 Navel orange (unpeeled)
– 1 bag of store-bought cranberries
– 1 Cup of white sugar

Directions:

Put all of that into a blender, and it’ll be fine if your huffing and puffing and shouting or totally distracted and thinking about this argument or that. If you like, you can throw in a few tablespoons of Grand Marnier.