Happy Genocidal Religious Fanatics Day!

Then, everyone started to die and were really careful to insist that they weren't eating corpses at the next Thanksgiving. Yeah, they never taught us that in elementary school. They also never explained Squanto's magical ability to speak English. If they did, then they would have to explain white people enslaving Native Americans and Squanto becoming an alcoholic, and that muddies up the whole Manifest Destiny storyline. A storyline, incidentally, that Sarah Josepha Hale popularized in the 1850s, leading many southerners to associate the holiday with abolition and refuse to celebrate it for many years (that's the short version, anyway), which means that you can associate some good -- abolition -- with this day. Sort of.

I didn't come here to give you a bastardized history of Thanksgiving, however. That would require effort. It's too early in the morning to put in effort for anything, especially since I am joining the fabulous VUBOQ and his neighbors in a 2 mile "fun run." I haven't actually run in over a month. Instead, I present to you my own Thanksgiving Cake Wrecks, courtesy of the Safeway bakery department, home of the Obama cookies.

You have your turkey for the traditional, tofurkey for the vegetarians, and this for the dessertatarians:

For the uninitiated, that second "turkey" is the ever popular cupcake cake. The baker squishes together a bunch of cupcakes into a shape that, if you squint your eyes and drink a few bottles of wine and maybe smoke a little weed (my brothers' favorite Thanksgiving morning tradition -- one day I'll tell you how they turned a hotel bathroom into a bong), might resemble something approximating something. Then, they ice the whole thing as if it were a very odd-shaped pan cake. The above is one result. Go to the Cake Wrecks website for worse examples.

Here is the cornucopia, accurate the one the Pilgrims had when they sat down to pass diseases on to the Wampanoag. Apparently they had oranges in Massachusetts. And ferns:

I suppose you could say that one is a combination vegetarian-desertarian cake.

May everyone catch up on grading, not have to put up with any p.i.t.a. relatives or in-laws, and get some rest. That is to say, have a happy holiday!