Thanksgiving really could be much much worse. Between spending an entire day with family, and an unappealing menu, it has all the makings of a torturous day. Let's score the holiday to see how it does:

Entertainment: Normally Thanksgiving rates very poorly in this category. We've all exchanged our family-safe stories a hundred times before, so there's not much new ground to cover. How many times can we hear my mother tell about the time I choked on a piece of banana? (My mother then held me upside down and shook me. Presumably this predates common knowledge of the Heimlich maneuver.) Daisy, however, had a great time with her cousins. Also, this year a family friend dropped by and she brought her genius 12 year-old son along. He entertained us with a fairly impressive yoyo demonstration. He practices 4 hours a day when he's not doing taking courses at the local college, so the boy has some mad skills. He also had some good yoyo-patter down. Any master yoyo-ist will tell you that a top performance has to include good yoyo patter. SCORE: B-

Deliciousness: Ugh. The Thanksgiving menu is virtually without merit. It's filled with dry meat (eww), orange vegetables (eww), sweet entrees (eww) and other bland mushy substances (eww). Stuffing is yummy, but that's the sole saving grace. Had the pilgrims never heard of Kung Pao chicken? Would it have killed the native Americans to share their recipe for chocolate mousse cake? I heard that the turkey almost became our national bird. That would have been awesome, saving many millions of people from choking out a forced, "Moist!" I'll bet bald eagle is delicious with gravy. SCORE: F+

Presents: None! SCORE: A+

Effort: Thanksgiving is a HUGE amount of cooking and cleaning effort. America spends 3 times the amount of time on Thanksgiving each year than they have on the entire Iraq war. The icing on the cake (oh that there were cake) is that Thanksgiving is only marginally more successful. I made up that statistic, but the score stands. SCORE: F-

And that's what I'm thankful for.