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A friend once told me that she found stuffing the Thanksgiving turkey to be a wildly erotic experience. “Think about it,” she said, gesturing with her hand. I made a face, then reminded her that the hole she was so keen on stuffing was actually the site of a recent ritual decapitation, not the sexy portal she might have in mind. She clearly wasn’t getting much action if the notion of cavity-searching a dead turkey gave her an annual thrill. To console her, I suggested that she might be happy pursuing a career at the U.S.-Canada border.
Apparently I’d spoiled her fun in a big way. Plus, she was clearly aware of my unspoken assessment of her carnal life. Needless to say, she hasn’t invited me for dinner since.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be all about gratitude, community and love. While I’ve tried hard to remember those elements each year, the day still ranks just below Christmas on my list of least favourite holidays. Maybe that’s because both occasions involve fisting a nude member of the avian tribe with buttered Wonderbread cubes as lube.
Or maybe it’s because I’ve never associated hot post-prandial sex with a feast starring the dietary equivalent of Ativan.
Think about it. What honest non-vegetarian person is ever game for vigorous sex after eating turkey? Even vegetarian Thanks-givers may find themselves sexually challenged after consuming heaps of mashed potatoes and various root vegetables that ought to be placed on a list of chemical weapons.
Turnip breath and two gut-swelling slices of pumpkin pie don’t tend to enhance lust either. So if the oft unmentioned historical politics of this holiday don’t manage to cool your crank, the menu surely will.
Maybe that’s what the Puritans had in mind way back when. But in my contemporary world, a carefully prepared meal should almost always lead to sex of some kind. It shouldn’t lead to inquiries like, “Do you think I’m fat? Oh, I am!” nor should it end in a snore-fest in front of bad TV in the name of familial closeness.
If I’d wanted to get fat sleeping in front of the TV after ingesting 3,000 calories in one sitting, I’d have married my grade-three sweetheart back home.
I don’t mind confessing that my last Thanksgiving holiday sucked in a huge way. In fact, it was an all-time personal low that just happened to clash with Gratitude Day. Consequently, I’ve been feeling a certain dread about this year’s nod to turkey slaughter and faux community.
Then she dons an apron that states “Will cook for sex” and waves her new spatula in my direction. She promises, in that sweet voice of hers that I hope to hear close-up forever: “This year Thanksgiving will be very, very different for you.”
All I can think is, “Thank you, God!” Wink, boom. Amen and thanks to every one of her British ancestors.
For various reasons, I feel myself gathering the superhuman strength to overcome food-induced sleepiness of any kind. Since my partner isn’t usually someone who enters the kitchen with anything but coffee-making on her mind, her virginal nervousness in the culinary realm has always been a real turn-on. I tend to swoon while watching her breathe hard peeling yams, for example.
Understandably, the thought of her stuffing a turkey and mashing potatoes sort of makes me rethink the unsexy aspect of Thanksgiving. In fact, for the first time in my life, Thanksgiving looks mighty sexy indeed.
After all, she’s in my life now, so the gratitude part is oh so easy. For one thing, we’ll be eating alone together by candlelight, as we always do. That often leads to mutual gratitude of a very specific non-Puritan kind.
This Thanksgiving I have so much to celebrate. She’s also promised not to make turkey with all the lazy-making fixings, but her specialty – spaghetti with meat sauce. It’s a menu choice my libido can work with, as past less-official nights of gratitude have demonstrated. Oh baby, all I can say is, thank you.
BiBi Brooklyn is a Toronto freelance writer.
