donald trump and mac and cheese, rachael gilbert

i’m not a fan of the majority of holidays. at least in my family, events like these always lend to loud debate over whatever “hot button” issue is popular that year (last year it was trans bathrooms, this year donald trump). they don’t really argue, so much as agree with one another very loudly as all of my family is pretty conservative.

as a liberal and a part of the LGBTQ community it’s more than a little awkward.

on most holidays i spend most of my time in my room or else reading quietly in the living room (it’s amazing how many books one can get through over a holiday. my youth pastor got me the shinning as a halloween present and i’ve been reading that…it’s pretty great and more than slightly terrifying). anyway, holidays aren’t fun.

i expected this year to be very similar to past years. and in some ways it was, i heard the phrase “make america great again” way too many times (sorry by the way if any of you guys reading this blog post are trump supporters but

1. i really doubt you are (hopefully)
2. literally no one reads one another’s blog posts anymore
3. i’m pretty convinced the majority of his support comes from my immediate family

i also don’t really know how to end the parenthesis after a list so…i’m just not going to.

anyway, this year my aforementioned youth minister, sara, came to our house for thanksgiving. her family lives pretty far away (either canada or california….i can’t really remember…either way it’s a hella long plane ride just to eat some turkey) so she spent the day with us. her being there was actually the best, i mean first of all, she brought mac and cheese.

let me just repeat that in case you got lost in that catastrophe of a paragraph.

SHE

BROUGHT

MAC

AND

CHEESE

(yes, for someone who does not like capitalization that was a hell of a lot of it but c’mon, mac. and. cheese.)

if not evidenced by the above, i love mac and cheese with a passion. i am a connoisseur of kraft. my family is a big believer in the “authentic thanksgiving experience” so we eat a lot of beans and kale and cranberries and twigs and shit.

mac and cheese is not typically on the menu.

but i love it.

and all i ate at thanksgiving this year was mac and cheese.

also, sara’s presence (kinda) toned down the political debate at the dinner table (which allowed me to further stuff my face with mac and cheese).

 after dinner sara and i watches les miserables together, which is one of my all-time favorite books, movies, and musicals. she had never watched it (before serving here she lived in like, montana, in a town where the nearest movie theatre was 117.6 miles away (sara likes to emphasize the .6) and netflix is fucking expensive.

so we cried together at the deaths of (spoiler alert) everyone. everyone dies in that movie. it is terrible and wonderful thing.

after that we went over to one of our close family friend’s house where i spent most of my time with my friend sydney and her cat watching the worst cooks in america, a terrible, yet addictive show that celebrates in the hilarity of other people’s failures.

            so, yeah, holidays aren’t the best. they’re messy and sad and frustrating and full of people i don’t always agree with. but those people are my family, i love ‘em. this year, thanksgiving got a little bit better with good friends, a really sad movie, and way too much mac and cheese.

            and, at least, in my cynical and sometimes overbearing way, i am thankful for that.