Several years ago we had an idea at the Journal to do a column about the rules of Thanksgiving family touch football. At the time I was just desperate for a column. Then, weirdly, happily, it turned into a thing. People read the Thanksgiving Rules column, passed it around, disagreed with it, posted it on Facebook, offered their own rules. Readers started sending in photographs of their own family touch football games—whole clans posed in the backyard, looking as if they had just rolled around in the rosebushes. (Sometimes they sent in the score.) In 2014 we got Bruce Arians of the Arizona Cardinals—a real-live NFL head coach—to diagram a special touch football play. To this day, the Thanksgiving column is the column people ask me about. Or yell at me about.
TEN KEY RULES FOR THE THANKSGIVING TOUCH FOOTBALL GAME
1. Your touch football game must take place before Thanksgiving dinner. Trust me: nobody in your family wants to play touch football after dinner. After dinner, everyone in your family wants to put on sweatpants and fall asleep watching a terrible NFL game.
2. Keep the touch football field much smaller than you think. Not regulation size—are you kidding? If that field is more than 40 yards long, six people in your family are going to wind up on oxygen in the hospital.
3. There are really two plays in touch football: go out short for a pass and go deep for a pass. Be careful about who you send out deep. If you make your Uncle Lou go out deep, Uncle Lou is going to need a few minutes to sit down in the back of his Lincoln.
4. How dare you sack your mother? That wonderful woman drove you to swimming lessons for six years and also let you watch Beverly Hills Cop when you were twelve.
5. Do not bring cleats or gloves or anything that gives the impression you were prepared for a family touch football game. If you show up in eye-black and an authentic NFL jersey, everyone is allowed ten minutes to point and laugh.
6. If you wear a blazer and tie to Thanksgiving, you will definitely be the first person pushed in the mud.
7. If you are new to the family and you catch three TD passes, you need to start dropping a few on purpose, or you’ll be promptly driven to the bus station and never invited back.
8. Yes, your aunt is drinking wine and eating crackers in the backfield. It’s okay. She also ran back an interception for a touchdown. So back off.
9. The halftime show? The halftime show is Dad drinking a bourbon on the porch and complaining about the neighbor who hung up his Christmas lights in the middle of September.
10. No whining, taunting, or sobbing in Thanksgiving touch football. That’s what Thanksgiving dinner is for.
I enjoy Thanksgiving. Almost all of it. I like that it’s a food-based holiday; I like that you’re not expected to bring a present; I like any day where it’s okay to fall asleep at 4:15 P.M. I like the cranberry sauce everyone says is natural, and also the canned cranberry lump that looks like a robot’s kidney. Of course Thanksgiving usually involves spending hours with extended family, and spending time with family can be treacherous—everyone has wanted to spend a Thanksgiving or two hiding beneath an upstairs bed. There are always food crises and travel hassles and strange guests and plenty of listless TV football. But it is an American ritual, and we are stuck with it. You can elope, you can drop out of college, you can ignore your children’s birthdays, but you’re on the hook for Thanksgiving.
★ In the months leading up, everybody mulls over two different versions of Thanksgiving: a version of Thanksgiving in which they spend time with their family and all the emotional turbulence that entails, and, conversely, a blissful version of Thanksgiving in which they skip the family turbulence and spend the holiday with close friends who don’t give them a hard time.
★ Let me get it out of the way: you’re not spending Thanksgiving with your friends. That only happens in movies and prison.
★ If you have to travel for Thanksgiving, there’s no magic secret. It’s all horrible. The roads are congested, the airplanes are overbooked, the trains are delayed, and somebody just walked onto the bus carrying a tub of gravy. Of course, you can take the bus in August and someone will walk on carrying a tub of gravy. That’s what happens on the bus.
★ Do not leave your mother in the lurch in your Thanksgiving plans. Your mother wants two things in life: she would like you to stay in touch and she would like the Thanksgiving plan to be ironed out at least eight weeks in advance, preferably ten. (Mom would also like someone to explain why she can’t download more than two movies on her iPad, but good luck on that.)
★ There will be some discussion about whether you should stay in your family’s house or just get a hotel. The hotel is completely worth it: it will give you some freedom and the ability to escape any family craziness, in the end making you fresher, happier, and better to be around. But sorry, you are staying at the house.
★ Nobody likes a visiting turkeyologist. A visiting turkeyologist is the person who, upon arrival in the host’s kitchen, begins to propose an alternative cooking strategy for the turkey, based on a careful reading of a magazine article he or she perused on the train. The visiting turkeyologist expresses suspicion that the host’s turkey will be cooked to its potential and begins fussing with the oven. It is okay to stash this person in the garage until dinner is served.
★ Be careful about kitchen experiments. Everyone remembers the Thanksgiving when Uncle Steve was really excited to cook the turkey in the smoker and the whole family wound up having bowtie pasta instead.
★ Hovering and stealing food is an expected ritual of Thanksgiving, but proper kitchen hovering and food stealing must be executed under the cover of a dutifully performed kitchen assignment. If you are peeling potatoes, nobody will notice that you just ate 2 pounds of stuffing.
★ Don’t spoil your dinner by eating all the cheese and drinking all the vodka.
★ Of course, too much vodka and by three o’clock you might be jumping on the dining room table and telling everyone in the family what you really think of them.
★ There are at least two relatives who make “______’s famous” dishes. A “______’s famous dish” is a dish this relative has been making for fourteen years and nobody has the heart to tell him or her to stop bringing it. It is almost always cooked with a can of beer and at least one Snickers bar.
★ We are running out of people on this planet who know what they are doing with mashed potatoes. It’s a major cultural issue, like the decline of horse racing and clock-making.
★ Nobody gets much credit for making turnips either, but turnips are the offensive line of Thanksgiving. You think you don’t really need them, but try to get through a full Thanksgiving without turnips.
★ Be sure to hide all your Valium, because your cousins are coming and they know where it was last year.
★ Sure, make a healthy salad, but you know…it’s Thanksgiving. Let’s not get carried away.
★ Thanksgiving dinner will not start on time. Thanksgiving dinner always runs about ninety minutes behind, like a Prince concert.
★ Actually, that is pretty good for a Prince concert.
★ Thanksgiving is definitely a time when a lot of people like to break out the “good” china. If you have such a thing as “good” china, I am going to assume there is not a lot of talk about farting at your Thanksgiving table.
★ Every family remembers that year when Mom had a hip replacement and Dad panicked and moved Thanksgiving to that restaurant with the buffet and the chocolate fountain. You’re supposed to act like you didn’t enjoy that Thanksgiving because it wasn’t at home, but everyone secretly loved it and wished it happened every year.
★ When dinner finally begins, many families like to say grace. This is a time to give thanks for your health and your loved ones, and that your sister finally broke up with that married squash coach.
★ Thanksgiving dinner never looks or sounds like it does in the cinema. The fights are never as dramatic, the turkey is 50 percent less glamorous, and nobody’s dad resembles Craig T. Nelson.
★ When Craig T. Nelson was born, did he just look like somebody’s dad?
★ If someone at your Thanksgiving did the 8:00 A.M. town Turkey Trot, you are never going to hear the end of it.
★ A Thanksgiving paradox: you will spend your entire childhood trying to get to the adult table and then all of your adult life trying to get back to the kids’ table. When you’re a kid, you don’t realize how much the kids’ table rocks. You can sit down when you want, and there’s not a lot of emphasis on table manners or even eating your whole plate, and usually there’s been enough worry that you won’t eat enough that someone just drops a whole pizza in the middle of the table. Stop me when any of this sounds bad. (Up until the early ’80s, kids could smoke cigarettes at the kids’ table.)
★ You can unbutton at the table, but please be discreet. One button. Two or more buttons may wind up being forgotten and end up poorly for you in family photos.
★ By now even the trainers have given up instructing people to take it easy at Thanksgiving. They know it’s a lost cause. The problem is you have three slices of pie, and then it becomes a habit, and then you have a twenty-three-slices-of-pie-a-week problem and are robbing pie stores to get more pie.
★ You have an aunt who is feeding an imaginary dog under the table.
★ A good old-fashioned political screaming match can be very lively and just the spark your dinner needs. If you are so stubborn in your political opinions that you shout everyone down, you are ready to run for president.
★ Yes, we saw your new car outside. No, we’re not asking you about it.
★ You need to have at least one new person at your Thanksgiving dinner every year. It is not this person’s job to cook or clean. It is his or her job, however, to have his or her life picked apart like an alien abductee’s.
★ If you are the new person at somebody else’s Thanksgiving, it is your job to have a very colorful life and romantic escapades. If you do not have a colorful life or romantic escapades, make some of them up. There’s a good chance nobody has watched Mad About You in years, so you can just use plotlines from that.
★ The neighbor who comes over and says, “I’m just staying for a drink” and then stays for the entire Thanksgiving dinner? That was his plan all along.
★ Late in the dinner, grandmothers like to have another cocktail and go over the year in family wakes and funerals.
★ My brother, Chris, has always been a master of the sneak-away nap. He would pull out of dinner early, maybe twenty-five minutes in, citing fatigue, and then uncork a solid hour nap, returning in time for dessert, perfectly timed.
★ The proper amount of space between the end of Thanksgiving dinner and dessert is thirty minutes. Anything longer than thirty minutes, your guests will fall asleep or drive back home to North Carolina.
★ In my family there was always a polite hesitation about turning on the television for the football game. Like, to surrender to the NFL would be an admission of family dysfunction or our inability to generate compelling family conversation. Every year, however, my Uncle Ken would finally turn on the football game and we’d all rush in there like sheep. Shout out to Uncle Ken: thank you.
★ Those families who send photos from the Caribbean of their Caribbean Thanksgiving? Everybody loathes them.
★ In recent years it has become popular for some retailers to begin their Black Friday sales on Thursday night. Do not support this inane trend. If you feel like you want to replicate the experience, blindfold yourself, tape $150 to your forehead and roll yourself down a hill in a shopping cart.
★ When dinner is over you maaaaay have to watch some kids perform a Thanksgiving play. It’s great! (Okay, the play is terrible but only about eight minutes long, so try to hang in there.)
★ If you are going to invite children to perform an impromptu postdinner concert, please consider what kind of music they’ve been practicing lately. If one of the children just began accordion lessons, slip off to the backyard.
★ You think nobody notices that you’re not doing dishes; they totally notice that you’re not doing dishes.
★ There are people who will happily wash dishes but are “pan shy”: they don’t want to muscle down and do the hard, greasy work with the pans. Don’t be pan shy. Get your elbows in there and rustle around. Don’t say, “I’m just going to let it soak.” If somebody says, “I’m just going to let this pan soak,” they will not set foot in the kitchen for two and a half years.
★ There’s a really hard-to-scrub pan that sits in the bottom of the sink longer than any other pan. The person who cleans this pan will marry one of your siblings within eighteen months.
★ At a certain point all the kids under ten will go upstairs to watch three minutes of Finding Nemo followed by the entirety of Amityville Horror II and III.
★ If fewer than three people cry, it isn’t a real family Thanksgiving, and you have to start over.