My Very First Video Thanksgiving Toast
by: Max Burbank

Grade school pageants notwithstanding, the modern celebration of Thanksgiving has little to do with Pilgrims, Native Americans and cornucopia, whatever they hell those are. Thanksgiving was not an annual American tradition until Abraham Lincoln, our first openly Gay President, declared "As long as we are engaged in a civil war that tests whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, what say we take a day off to eat like pigs with family members many of whom we can't stand and then fall asleep watching football."

In that spirit, I have labored over the years to make sure that you, the I-Mockery audience, might enjoy a special, festive thanksgiving article written by me while at least partially sober. The first one was a piece of cake. Phoned it in off the top of my head. The next year the task was a little more difficult, as I'd already made all the easy jokes about getting caught stuffing the Turkey. The next year, I had two damn articles worth of lackluster, hack comedy I was obligated not to repeat. The Thanksgiving article had become work, and I had begun to hate you for it, with good reason, I think. By the fourth year, I had to do actual research to find new material, which granted, the Internet makes easy, but up until that day I had used the Internet only as God intended it to be used; a portal for degrading, mostly Eastern European pornography.

This year there was just no way I would ever be able to come up with fresh, topical Thanksgiving material for you without actual, creative work, and this I have vowed never, ever to do. So how lucky is it for all concerned that I just tumbled across the richest vein of easily exploitable natural resources since that long ago day when an impoverished Appalachian mountaineer just "Shootin' at some food" missed the diseased squirrel that would have been his dinner, and "up from the ground came a bubblin' crude." I'm talking of course about young people and their seemingly savant computer skills.

Long story short, with the help of one of these 'youngsters' I was able to simply ramble in the presence of a computer and she transformed it into a short film. How much effort did I put in? I'm proud to say very, very little. And if by happenstance I accidentally incorporated some material from Thanksgiving's past, you won't be able to prove it without making a transcript, which will be more work than I did, so more fool you.

And so, without any further typing, which quite frankly has become more of a burden than it's worth, I give you...

MY VERY FIRST VIDEO THANKSGIVING TOAST:

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