Thanksgiving past and present, game choice overload

Thanksgiving has always been a mixed bag as far as holidays go for me. When I was younger, it meant going to grandma’s for a fancy feast. For the occasion she would bring out the gold plated silverware. All of my immediate relatives were there like my great grandmother, Aunt Sis, my cousins and aunt and uncles. The most memorable food item for me was the dried corn. It sort of looked like animal feed in water, but it tasted ok. Before every holiday meal my grandfather would say a short prayer that always ended with “…for without you Lord we’re nothin…. Amen…” After dinner the entertainment options were somewhat limited but we entertained ourselves by watching football on their 19 inch TV, shooting a basketball that desperately needed air at the basketball net mounted on the garage roof, walking the railroad tracks in the back, looking for loose railroad spikes to add to our collection or possibly throwing darts at the dartboard down in the basement. At the time, I remember the event feeling like somewhat of a drag. Today, I wish I would have appreciated the time more, because like all things, it went away and can never be relived again.

As I went into my 20’s, my first wife had a huge family and they were all about the holidays. They had huge get togethers that were organized chaos. I came to really enjoy them at first, towards the end of my marriage I came to despise them for reasons that are not bloggable.

In my late 20’s to early 30’s, my grandmother was now living alone since my grandfather died, in her apartment. Typically, my mom would host dinner with only a handful of relatives and we would bring grandma over. Later in the day we would try to stop by my Dad’s for a secondary dinner as well. Thanksgiving during that time period was ok but wasn’t as interesting as before.

Now since we moved to Florida, Thanksgiving is close to a non-event besides the fact that I get off from work for 2 days. This year our Thanksgiving will go like this: Watch some of the Macy’s parade, go pick up my mom and go out to Thanksgiving dinner at a local restaurant. In probably less than an hour the entire meal will be over, so we will drop mom off. Go back home. Watch football. Do some tile work. Moving down here does have some definitive drawbacks and the lack of traditional family functions is one big one. I suspect the only way Thanksgiving would regain any of it’s luster is if we would have a child.

There are an amazing onslaught of quality gaming titles being released all at around the same time. Doom 3 was released a few months ago, followed by Star Wars Battlefront. United Offensive add on for Call of Duty came out recently and throw in the long awaited Halo 2 for Xbox and now today World of Warcraft, the new MMOG game from Blizzard based on the Warcraft series. All of these games are outstanding and as a gamer I’d like to be able to immerse myself into each one of them. The downside is to do this requires huge time commitments and with a wife, a house, a dog, tivo and full plate of responsibilities, it seems increasingly difficult to find the time to do so. My days of spending 16 hours playing Bionic Commando are not likely to be returning.