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Thanksgiving is almost here! Every year I stay up late waiting for the pilgrims to land the Mayflower on the roof, slide down the chimney and if we’ve been good, leave Thanksgiving presents, or maize. Sometimes I get so excited I can barely sleep!

Anyway, remember all the great stuff you uploaded around Halloween? It was awesome! Jordan Crowder’s Parannoying Activity was so good we put it into this week’s Showdown, where it’s cleaning up.

Anyway, we want to make sure we have lots of stuff from you guys for Thanksgiving too, so upload your videos, and leave a link here in the comments so we don’t miss anything. We’ll be featuring a bunch of our favorites next week, and getting as many of them into the Showdown as we possibly can. So pull on those pilgrim hats, roast up like 50 turkeys, or whatever it takes to you get your creative process going and get creating!

Before we get started, it’s important to note that this guide is targeted at avoiding common familial pitfalls during this holiday season.  It is not a course in survival skills for any turkeys that are reading this.  Haha!

(It’s funny because turkeys can’t read so they don’t know I want to messily devour their tender flesh until my belly is swollen.  I’m what you might call a “trypto-fan”, which is a hilarious joke if you like amino acid humor.)

For many the Thanksgiving celebration begins a few days early with a festive anxiety attack.  For me, Thanksgiving is the impending promise of being cornered by obnoxious relatives for awkward conversation and drunken knife fights.  Granted, most of the knife fights are instigated by me as a method to avoid conversations, but I contend anyone who insists on telling back to back stories about their cat effectively threw the first punch.  And on one occasion it was clearly self-defense when Grandma neglected her meds and came at me with the business end of a gravy boat:

Still, even for families not quite as stab-inclined as mine, there are innumerable ways for the affair to take ugly turns.  This guide should help you avoid some of the common mistakes.

1) Opinions Are Harmony-Killing Viruses
One should approach a holiday dinner with family like a first date – keep your expectations low and the conversation benign.  The latter can be particularly difficult when Thanksgiving follows an election season, especially one featuring a heated presidential race.  Even if you see Obama’s ascension to power as fulfilling a centuries-old liberal prophecy this is no time to gloat.

“Then, on Christmas Eve, Barack will fly over each house delivering toys to all children that are mindful of their carbon footprint and tax credits to their middle class parents”

Another common example is the token family vegetarian.  While many holidays feature a central meat dish, Thanksgiving is the only one that makes carnivorous lust the centerpiece (at least until California ratifies my petition to have August 1st be “‘Fuck Yeah, Bacon!’ Day”).

My stomach and penis are still debating on who likes this most

Pressed for explanation a responsible vegetarian will have no shortage for information pointing at the toxicity of modern meat preparation and gross corruption within the industry.  Worse, those dicks are 100% correct about it.  Fortunately holidays are designed to be an escapist affair and truth doesn’t count for much.  It is only the undeniable fact that tofurky sucks that allows Thanksgiving to remain unscathed.

There are infinite examples of personal opinions and ideals potentially turning the family meal into an emotional cage-match.  The key is to weigh your satisfaction of being right against enjoying cholesterol-laden mashed potatoes in peace.  As always in life, let the mashed potatoes be your guide.

2) Embrace The Kitchen

The burden of creating a comprehensive Thanksgiving meal is worrisome.  Stepping up with a dish is your opportunity to lighten the load as well as assure there will be at least one plate that won’t elicit dry-heaves.  Allow me to offer a recipe that has historically served me very well:

Yes, I’m aware that Jack Daniels is a Tennessee Whiskey and not a bourbon.  What kind of alcoholic do you take me for?

3)  Repression Is Love

Many of us don’t get to see our families all that often, making holidays one of the few avenues for face-time.  That can make it a seductive moment to finally break the silence on admissions that are too intimate for a phone conversation.  I politely sugest you take that idea, put its mouth on the curb, and don’t quit stomping until it stops twitching.

They may not know the specifics, but rest assured your parents know what a freak you are.  They also know that while they’ll have to deal with it someday, they’d appreciate it if they don’t have to recall your scrotal piercing every time they bite into a mouthful of stuffing.

“Lord, thank you for keeping everyone safe and shutting Kyle the fuck up about his new coked-out polyamory Furry friends.”

Ian Cheesman sincerely hopes that you have a wonderful Thanksgiving, but he’s also quietly hoping that his will be better than yours.

You know what else goes well with cranberry sauce? http://internetsensation.com

It’s Thanksgiving time, and while the typical American family’s annual tradition of violently arguing with their in-laws and swearing about football while simultaneously attempting to devour an entire gargantuan, hideous bird may seem a little odd to you, just remember: It could be worse… you could be some sort of crazy foreigner! So, in the spirit of ignorant xenophobia, I present to you a few different ways people have celebrated their Thanksgiving that make you look like kind of a pussy for complaining about the fact that there’s grapes in your stuffing, (seriously, why are there grapes in the stuffing? Nobody likes that. Don’t do that.)

Hangin’ Out with Hippies in the Desert

The Ancient Egyptians celebrated their spring harvest-time with festivities dedicated to Min, the god of vegetation and fertility. Yes, they had one god for both ferns and fuckin’, a fact which may well have made Min the world’s very first hippy.

They would engage in the general sort of all-around carousing you’d expect of an Ancient people just stoked at the prospect of not starving to death for a few weeks, but more specifically they mimicked a lot of the fundamentals that make up our modern day Thanksgivings: They threw parades, feasted, and even watched sporting events!

However, the similarities end there, as it was also tradition to throw yourself upon the ground and wail in extreme mock-grief in order to fool the crop spirits. So unless you have to sob like a little girl with a dead pony every time you see a sweet potato, it’s safe to say your Holiday’s got one up on the ancient Egyptians.

Celebrating Cheerios

The Romans held an annual festival in the fall of every year in honor of their harvest god, Ceres. They threw the standard sporting events, parades, and feasts that are still common to most harvest celebrations, and all was generally unremarkable save for the standard vomiting and orgies that made Ancient Romans so great. The festival was called Cerelia, and because Ceres was the god of the corn crop, we eventually derived the word for Cereal from those celebrations.

Ceres just wants to know what the deal is with those plastic bags – so hard to open! Right?!

While that certainly doesn’t sound all bad, you’ve just got to think how shitty the rest of the year had to be, when your entire society throws a giant parade in honor of the simple fact that people get to have breakfast.

We Give Thanks to Thee For This Night Train, O Lord

Read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots, or just get drunk and punch your step-dad because he’s not the boss of you!