Spitball Army

While I was growing up, our house was the evening stop on Christmas Eve for relatives and friends, who would congregate in the late afternoon and early evening for a meal centered on the contents of two very large pots on my mother’s stovetop. One contained pinto beans, soaked and seasoned for a couple of days, and piping hot. The other contained her wonderful chili, a crock-pot treatment of which I have perfected over the ensuing decades. The meal also had a few other key ingredients.

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A mainstay of Comedy Central since 1997, South Park began as an exercise in vulgarity, with an emphasis on the scatological. “The round-headed protagonists may look like cruder versions of the ‘Peanuts’ gang, but ‘crude’ is the operative word,” sniffed Gail Pennington in an August 13, 1997 review for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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Matteson’s Flower Shop in Leucadia, California. Photographed on 21 December 2008, 9:56 a.m.

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Henrietta and Myrna wish you a flat affect Christmas.

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Tom & John’s house at Christmas

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Kevin & Melissa’s house at Christmas

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I looked it over, and the recipe definitely needed some revising, so as not to taste bland, or like a soggy green bean stew. The addition of two ingredients guaranteed to clog the arteries (bacon and cheese), and a reapportioning of the size of other ingredients and an adjustment of temperature and cooking time and, voila…a tasty wintertime harvest dish for a table full of hungry revellers.

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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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Over the ensuing twleve months, that post has been seen enough times through Google searches and the like that it is the #9 most-viewed page on this labyrinthine website. And every single person who has seen it has moved on without having that secret yellow cake mix cookie recipe to put to use.

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If you’ve ever spent the Thanksgiving holiday away from family, spent the day travelling, or just plopped yourself down like a slug on the sofa all day, there is something for you to identify with in Ray Davies’ “Thanksgiving Day.”

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