The Three F's of Thanksgiving

Welcome to Week one of The Thanksgiving Eleven!  This year, I've decided the theme of the first three weeks will follow my famous Three F's of Thanksgiving:  Food, Football, and Family...in some order!  This week we will focus on Family (the most important, but hardest to write about...since there's only so much one can write about his own family before it gets boring).  To kick off this week, though, I wanted to bring back the post in 2008 that started it all.  Here are the Three F's of Thanksgiving!

Food, football, and family...the three F-words that make for an amazing holiday.  These are the three F’s of Thanksgiving!

Let’s start with FOOD!  Thanksgiving is the one holiday centered on food.  The Thanksgiving Feast is a glorious feast.  You can eat all you want without the fear of people looking at you funny for eating so much.  To hell with diets!  To hell with watching what you eat.  I'll watch it straight into my mouth!  There's so much to choose from, turkey, stuffing, crescent rolls, cranberry sauce, corn, peas, more turkey, gravy, yams, potatos, dark meat, light meat, and tryptophan! MmmmmmmMMMM!  Thems some good eats right there!  Load up and deal with the consequences later!  A later post during FOOD week will take a much closer look at this most popular F of Thanksgiving when I post my top 10 feast items list…but for now, lets just say that, if for no other reason, Thanksgiving is amazing because of the delicious meal we get to partake in!

Moving on, let’s hit up FOOTBALL!  Thanksgiving is all about FOOTBALL!  The first ever football game played on Thanksgiving Day occurred in 1876 when Yale and Princeton squared off.  Of course, these days, there’s the three NFL games on Thanksgiving.  The Lions always host the morning game (this year against the Green Bay Packers…which should be a spectacular contest), and the Cowboys always host the afternoon game (this year against the Raiders).  In recent years, the NFL added in a third game on Thanksgiving, previously broadcast by the NFL Network.  This is a night game that rotates teams.  This year’s game is being broadcast by NBC (which makes sense, no one gets the NFL Network) and is the Ravens hosting the Steelers...which will probably be a snoozer.  The best football part of Thanksgiving, though, is our annual backyard family football game.  We’ve been playing this game every single year.  And, even though we are now all fully grown and far too big for the yard, we still play every year…and still very much look forward to it.  Always a blast!

On that note, the third, final, and most important F of Thanksgiving is FAMILY!  Thanksgiving is an entire long weekend to spend with one’s family.  This, I believe, will be my 31st Thanksgiving.  And every year of those that I can remember has been spent in Lancaster with my dad’s side of the family.  I do not get to see them very often, but I can mark this weekend on the calendar, and I always look forward to it.  Between seeing all my cousins, to getting to spend time talking with the aunts and uncles, and, of course, seeing my grandparents…its always a phenomenal time.  I truly cherish all the time I can spend with my family.  We have a family football game every Thanksgiving.  Throughout the weekend we will have a family movie afternoon and a family game evening.  My cousins and I will play capture the flag, or basketball, or football, or Jurassic Park Baseball (haha, don’t ask…long story).  So much tradition behind my Thanksgiving weekend in Lancaster…its something I’ll never, ever give up.

So, there we have it, the three F’s of Thanksgiving:  Food, Football, and Family!  Hopefully you will be enjoying all three of these next Thursday as much as I will be!

Wednesday we will jump into that final F...Family.