Queer Thanksgiving

One of my favorite made-up holidays we started during undergrad is Queer Thanksgiving, where everybody just brings whatever they feel like bringing and it ends up being a weird, fabulous potluck where people leave with stomachaches, just like normative Thanksgiving. I write saccharine posts about this every November, so we will just leave it there.

But Gay Thanksgiving is obvious enough that it has been autonomously started by thousands of people, and in the absence of Queer Thanksgiving, I was kind of excited to have a Gay Thanksgiving tonight. I threw together some stuffed peppers - I will be eating a giant mass of stuffed pepper filling for approximately a week, and also my kitchen looks like someone detonated a bag of couscous - and hustled over to our Gay Thanksgiving.

It was totally charming, and kind of exactly what I needed as I wind down this term. When you spend all day deleting and retyping single paragraphs, seeing humans whose company you enjoy is surprisingly reenergizing. Within five minutes, a stranger was like, "hey, we met like five years ago in your undergraduate library," and I was like, "behold, the magic of Gay Thanksgiving." I also took a ten minute break from my otherwise sterling vegetarianism - which has exceptions for seafood, novelty, or meats consumed while abroad - and ate a slice of turducken. I ended up catching up with people for like four hours before walking home in a food euphoria and then it began to snow, and I was like, oh, my faith in made-up holidays is totally restored.