My One Issue With Thanksgiving...

I love Thanksgiving. I’d put it toward the top of my Holiday Power Rankings. In fact, I love it so much, that I used it as the basis for the holiday I invented to celebrate my own birthday, creatively named, “Mattsgiving.”

I do, however, have one complaint…

Gourds… I hate gourds.

With one notable exception: the pumpkin. And I mean the full-size pumpkin, not the dumb miniature one that looks like someone stomped on it. The real pumpkin is welcome at my Thanksgiving table anytime it pleases. The rest of its gourd brethren can pound sand.

Why does the pumpkin get a pass? Because it has uses. Legitimate uses, a notable one being that it’s the key ingredient in the pie which bares its name. Collectively, the other members of the gourd family have a grand total of zero uses. They have a goose-egg in the use department.

They only time those non-pumpkin gourds make an appearance is at Thanksgiving when the host of the dinner you’re attending decides to dump a bag of them right in the middle of the table.

But Matt, they’re festive.

So? Snow is festive. It’s associated with Christmas, but if someone dumped a shovel-full of snow in the middle of your dining room table, you’d think it was total bullshit.

Easily the worst of the gourds is that one with the bumps all over it. Nothing makes you lose your appetite for turkey and stuffing faster than having to stare at a vegetable covered in tumors.

Also, keep in mind that we use farmland to grow these gourds. I repeat: valuable farmland is set aside to grow what are essentially nothing more than doorstops or paper weights. In fact, as long as we’re producing gourds, I don’t want to hear that we don’t have the means to grow enough food to keep everyone fed. It's not a “too many people” issue, or even a “farming techniques that aren’t efficient enough” problem, it’s a too many gourds problem!

Some may think that I’ve been too hard on the gourds. Those poor li’l guys have one day a year to shine, let them have it, right?

WRONG!

They’re the one thing standing between me and a virtually perfect Thanksgiving. So, if you see one of those gourds this holiday season, I want you to do the right thing and smash it, Gallagher style, right in front of your friends and family.

(By the way, if you actually do that, be sure to tweet me the video, @matt_reigle. I would like to see it).