So You Think The 1st Thanksgiving Was About Crops and Turkeys

Well, as my dad used to say, "everything comes out in the wash."

Remember how piously your grade school teachers used to tell you about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, and how Puritan settlers suffered through hard winters until they learned about agriculture and the abundant wildlife in the New Land?

Ha!

Wildlife indeed. As Bill Duryea of the Scripps Howard News Service tells the Chicago Sun-Times, the Pilgrims weren't such a bunch of dour, joyless fanatics after all.

Nope, it turns out that they drank three times as much booze per person as modern Americans, loved to go bowling, approved of premarital sex, and let their daughters bed down with the hired help as compensation for a full day's work.

Four hundred years later, on this day, let us reflect on the bounties that we enjoy, the humble origins of this great land and the lasting traditions handed down to us by our forefathers and foremothers ... among them, bowling, booze and sex. May we, through daily effort, forever be worthy of this feast so hard earned by those who came before us to carve out a new life in a new land.

Now, pass me the dark meat and hey, while you're up, can you grab me another beer and flip the toob to the bowling finals on ESPN.

And tonight, hon ... we're going to play "Settler woman and the Indian Chief."

God Bless America!

and God Bless You All!