Continue Reading...

You may not the kind of person who misses Thanksgiving to set up camp in front of a Best Buy (and if you are, no judgment, but you're insane). Conversely, you may not be the kind of person who goes in for the whole festivity thing at all. But nearly all of us get swept up to some extent in the frenzy that starts somewhere right after Halloween, goes full-tilt bonkers after Thanksgiving, and ends sometime on the afternoon of Jan. 1 in the kind of tears and exhaustion one usually experiences only after giving birth or running a marathon.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

The Black Friday walkout is being organized by the Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Walmart), a group of Wal-Mart employees formed last year that works closely with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, or UFCW. OUR Walmart, which organized walkouts in October, is pushing for better working conditions, benefits, and an end to alleged retaliation by management.

Continue Reading...

Consider the example of the Kelley family in Fort Myers, Fla., so determined to sacrifice nothing of their quality of life while in quest for the perfect deal that they showed up in front of the local Best Buy's doors on Monday, equipped with a dinner table.

This is what we call not messing around:

Continue Reading...

I pulled my lumpy down coat tight against me in the frigid car. The heater was broken, Kevin had insisted when we left Flagstaff the night before; there was simply no point in testing it.

I looked over at his bony hand gripping the wheel, knuckles white. The other stroked a goatee to a sharp point below the chin. Kevin sat ramrod straight, glaring out at the road, his right eye narrowed ferociously.

Suddenly I was wide awake, feigning nonchalance.

“You okay, Thunderbolt?” I asked him, calling him by his stage name.

“Fine, Ace,” he replied sharply.  That was my nickname back then. “Really just fine.  Now why don’t you go back to sleep?”

His grip tightened.  The radio crackled from a distant storm.

* * * * *

A few days earlier I’d gotten a call my friend John Zarske, like Kevin a bluegrass and folk musician.  I’d recently moved to New York from Flagstaff, and was in my first semester at NYU.

Continue Reading...

What would she do? I asked. Would the family wait dinner for her?

"No," she said. "I'll eat leftovers when I get home from work. It's what I did last year, too."

And I was so angry on her behalf. But she needed her job, and she couldn't say no without the risk of being fired, and so a mother who should have been spending time with her child on our most family-friendly day was shipping off to help sell cheap flat-screen televisions to the masses.

How did this happen?

Thanksgiving used to be a time to be grateful for what you already had. Back when George Washington declared it a national holiday, almost all work came to a stop. I’m still moved by Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post cover, depicting a family's simple joy. The painting was called “Freedom From Want.”

Continue Reading...

Here's our guide to the most sinister forces of what some conservatives are calling the "War on Thanksgiving":

• Barack Obama: Let's start at the top. Last year, the president was alternately trashed by conservatives for not mentioning God in his Thanksgiving Day YouTube address and for describing the Obama family's Thanksgiving Day plans thusly: "Like millions of Americans, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will spend the day eating great food, watching a little football, and reflecting on how truly lucky we truly are." Social conservative Bryan Fischer was quite angry about the "luck" thing, saying that it really "grinds my gears" to hear the president talk that way, and this "is the most offensive thing that  I've ever heard President Obama say: that we are lucky, that everything we enjoy in America is the result of pure luck. It's not. It has to do with our values, it has to do with our faith in God, it has to do with God's providential care."

Continue Reading...

I don't remember everything that happened. Memories change. But I remember one day in the summer of probably 1963 a typewritten page appeared on the refrigerator. At the top it said, PROCLAMATION. It said that henceforth, it being that the washing of dishes was a task unfairly foisted upon certain individuals and not others, this being not fair, etc., HENCEFORTH each child was to be allotted one stainless steel drinking glass, each to be of a distinct and different color, and each child was henceforth to be responsible for his or her own drinking glass and no other and that throughout the day when any child under the jurisdiction of this PROCLAMATION wished to have a drink of water he or she was to wash and reuse his or her own glass and no other.

My mother had begun making such proclamations right after she started going to work and wasn't around to personally supervise our caucus.

Continue Reading...

From insect-filled feasts to turkey done Guy Fieri-style, here's Salon's roundup of the weirdest, the grossest and the downright strangest Thanksgiving fare our great nation (and Canada!) has to offer. Bon appétit!

[slide_show id=13103203]

Continue Reading...

That's why we've put together a plan to ensure that your holiday extravaganza will also be a memorable one.

First, invite your family to Thanksgiving with this invitation:

You'll want to impress them, so plan ahead with some recipes from highly regarded restaurateur Guy Fieri:

On Thanksgiving Day, serve them this bacon-wrapped turkey:

Or this one, "brined in Dunkin’ Donuts coolattas, stuffed with munchkins and served with coffee gravy and mashed hash browns":

Continue Reading...

If you actually want to engage your right-wing relatives -- and let me be clear, you really should not do this, you are going to ruin Thanksgiving -- it's best to come prepared. Below, you'll find a series of talking points designed to address some of the most popular current trending topics in the alternate conservative media world. (You'll find last year's guide here.)

Continue Reading...

In one mode, it is a room in which I sit. It is a room where my mother sits and works, surrounded by piles of papers. It was once my father's study. Much has changed since he occupied it. Much hasn't. It is dynamic, a country with different regions.

In the other mode, however, I see it but do not occupy it. It is an image, at times as still as a photo. More often, it's a movie. And this movie stars my mother, who sits in her chair accompanied by her array of toys and funny stuffed animals who come trotting into view to the delight of my children. This room is the backdrop to our video conferences. They used to take place Sunday morning. Now they occur Saturday morning.

On my mother's end it is a still shot -- the camera on her iMac is unmoving. She has accompanied us for hours. Her stamina in these video conferences is incredible. At times I feel like she is a virtual baby sitter. She is so inventive! The monkey, Flamingo, Duckie, I could go on. And music. If there is one shortcoming it is her limited mastery of the computer.

Continue Reading...

This year, however, Americans voted on which turkeys would receive the pardon, giving the president the perfect opportunity to crack a joke about Nate Silver, the New York Times polling wizard who accurately predicted the Election Day results.

"Once again, Nate Silver completely nailed it," Obama said. "The guy's amazing. He predicted these guys would win."

Continue Reading...

“Michael Jackson: Bad25” (Thursday, 9:30 p.m. EST, ABC)

On the 25thanniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s epic “Bad,” Spike Lee has assembled a documentary about the making of that album. It features interviews with everyone from Martin Scorsese (who directed the “Bad” video) to Sheryl Crow (who sang a duet with Jackson on the record) to the less directly involved Mariah Carey, Justin Bieber and Kanye West. There’s also behind-the-scenes footage of the King of Pop hard at work (how did he do that leaning dance thing?). Watching a man in his prime hard at work should help you digest your enormous dinner, right?

"Liz and Dick" (Sunday, 9 p.m. EST, Lifetime)

Lindsay Lohan plays Elizabeth Taylor in this made-for-TV movie about the scandalous, explosive romance between Taylor and Richard Burton. If just reading “Lindsay Lohan plays Elizabeth Taylor” makes you ill, skip it, but if you can stomach it, you’re in for a camp classic that’s totally terrible in a totally fun way.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

"Black Friday," wrote Eidelson, "workers have pledged -- barring concessions from the company -- will bring their biggest disruptions yet." Walmart employees across the country have a host of grievances including unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, sexual harassment, excessive hours, forced labor and low pay. Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC flagged a leaked internal document (first obtained by HuffPo) that revealed that base pay  at Walmart's Sam's Place stores can be as low as $8 an hour (or $16,000 per year), with wage increases in increments as low as 20 or 40 cents per hour. To put this in context, Gawker recently highlighted a Demos study that says that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

Continue Reading...

The 1980s:  An “Amreekan Holiday”

As a child, I often asked my mother what we were eating for Thanksgiving.

“Food,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“Are we eating a turkey?” I asked.

“No, only Amreekans eat turkey.”

Any immigrant or child of immigrants understands that “Amreekan” is a code word for “the mainstream,” which really means “white people.” In addition to celebrating Thanksgiving with a turkey, here are some other things we learned only “Amreekans” do:

• Wear shoes inside the home
• Receive “time out” as a valid form of punishment for unruly behavior
• Talk back to elders
• Have sex before marriage
• Put grandparents in senior homes
• Sleep over at friends’ homes
• Tattoos
• Christmas trees
• Cable television
• Shop at stores other than Ross, K-Mart, outlet stores, Marshalls and Mervyns (RIP)

Continue Reading...

Eric drove up to Julie’s the night before Thanksgiving to cook. An obsessed chef, Eric had spent a week planning the menu with his siblings. “I’m making my sweet potato casserole,” I said to Eric as he made a grocery list, “with mini marshmallows on top.” I sensed disappointment, a Campbell’s Soup casserole stuck out among toasted almond haricot vert and saffron-infused stuffed turkey, a recipe that involved coriander, cumin, cranberries and couscous. My mother roasted a turkey every year and we were lucky if she remembered to take the giblets out. “You don’t have to make anything,” Eric said. But alas, I insisted.

I drove the two hours to Julie’s house in Vermont on Thanksgiving Day, sweet potatoes on the passenger seat next to me. I imagined what I would say when I met Eric’s large family. Painfully shy, I needed to rehearse.

Continue Reading...

Thanks to Wall Street Occupier Jesse LaGreca, who didn't only show up the Fox reporter sent to embarrass occupiers, but also managed to get the OWS message across on a Sunday political chat show, which is essentially unheard of. So thanks to you, for bringing up economic justice to the ancient panel of crusty establishmentarians on "Meet on Press."

Thanks to Scott Olsen, the Iraq vet and victim of brutal police overreaction at Occupy Oakland, for showing the many forms that fighting for one's country can take. We're especially thankful that he's recovering from the coma induced by a tear gas canister fired directly at his head, and is well enough to give public statements.

Continue Reading...