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Smoked salmon & caribou stew for Thanksgiving?!

Aside from giving people a day to remember to be thankful (since remembering on the other 364 days of the year is way too difficult of a task) ... what is Thanksgiving usually for?

A time for family and friends to gather, eat turkey, mashed potatoes, perhaps some sort of bean dish, a little vino, some beer, some football, pecan pie, other assorted yummy goodies like that? And of course ya gotta kick the day off with watching the Macy's Thankgiving Day Parade, right? How about a DVD viewing of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving? (Dude, Peanuts always rules! Well, maybe not as much as Looney Tunes, but still great and definitely classic!)

Why not skip all that and just go to work?
Maybe even do a 24-hour shift?

Say from 9 a.m. Thanksgiving morning until about an hour ago, 9 a.m. this morning, the day after Thanksgiving.

No gatherings. No relatives. No turkey.

I could've had turkey, actually. There was a buffet spread deal all set up at the station, donated by a restaurant in town, and there were other dishes brought in by whoever.

My 24 hrs in food:
a few granola bars
some crackers
smoked salmon
and the best caribou stew I've ever had!

Thanksgiving's never a big deal for me anymore. It's not a deal at all, really. It's basically just another day. Since it is a huge holiday, and I wasn't scheduled to work, I actually volunteered for this shift (because some of the regulars had asked for this little bit of vacation time way in advance.) Not being married or involved with anyone right now, that right there makes me free to do whatever I want. My closest family members -- mom, dad, brother -- at over 4,000 miles (6,400 km) away, might as well be in Johannesburg.

So here I am, in exile, sort of, in a way, not really but kind of... a long way from the world that I came from. Much of everything is the same here but smoked salmon and caribou stew for Thanksgiving? Not gonna find much of that in Wyckoff, New Jersey!

Now today is America's hugest shopping day. Reportedly 50% of the population is doing some shopping in malls or other stores. And to prevent me from getting so angry at the disgusting commercialization of Christmas and the ultra-disgusting selfish mentality (in general) of the American people, I'm not gonna go into that subject. Just that much thought about it is already making me wanna stand up and throw my chair through the window.

In any case, I do hope people enjoyed their day yesterday.