Eat, drink, be merry and avoid politics

The Johnson and Nixon years set off food fights over the Vietnam War and Watergate. You might have thought we were courtside at a professional basketball game. One young woman in bell-bottom jeans and beads raised her glass to Ho Chi Minh and Jane Fonda. A few years later she was watching Jane Fonda exercise videos, more concerned with her thighs than men at arms. Feathers flew when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, and at a later dinner some diners imagined Jimmy Carter was the turkey.

Nancy Reagan raised more hackles than Ronnie from the burgeoning feminists who dismissed her as the Stepford wife of a movie star who never really shimmered. (What really galled some of us was that she wore a size 2 and could have all the pumpkin pie she wanted.)

Propriety disappeared with the miniskirt and then with piercings in strange places, and with the Clinton years one of the 6-year olds shocked Grandpa with a question about verbal if not oral sex. The Thanksgiving that fell with the hanging chads during the Florida countdown required an official notice that anyone who brought up the election would get no marshmallows on their sweet potatoes.

Well, as Gilda Radner used to say on Saturday Night Live: "It's always something." That's the charm of these family gatherings, and Thanksgiving, still unspoiled by the commercialization that has soiled our other holidays, is the most amiable of all. So let's keep our sense of humor. Tom Lehrer, the comic songwriter, kept his by rewriting my favorite Thanksgiving hymn:

We gather together to ask the lord's blessing

So sing praises to his name and forget not to floss.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.