When did Thanksgiving Day become the home of bad TV football and lame movies?

It was okay, way back when, when the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions are halfway decent football teams. They haven't been halfway decent for so long I think it was Milt Plum and Don Meredith who played in their last good tv game. I exaggerate, of course. There were some good games in there somewhere. Most, however, were bigger turkeys than ever sat on the family table.

But fear not, people, for I have uncovered the Madison Avenue plot behind all this bland Holiday fare.

It works this way:

You invite your family over for turkey and stuffing (with the cranberry jelly and candied yams). You serve up some good wine, maybe some mulled cider, and while the bird minishes its sentence in the oven -- or for the hipper, more adventurous of you, in the deep fryer -- you all sit around, watch a little TV and catch up on each other's lives.

Actually, you have to catch up on each other's lives because television is SO BORING!!!!!

So here's the diabolocal twist. This Holiday-enforced boredom is a plot to entice family and friends to invest in new DVDs (VHS for you unhip) so that this sort of thing doesn't happen when you all get together NEXT month at Christmas. And since Friday is the dreaded Black Friday of the retail world, the powers that be are expecting shoppers to hit those DVD bins RIGHT AWAY. Beware -- your friends and family will be out there buying you rerun packages from M*A*S*H and Friends for your viewing enjoyment. They'll be scarfing uo copies of all those movies you didn't want to drag yourself into the theater to see in the first place, all so you can have something new and interesting to watch the next time the family gathers to overeat and stroll down memory lane and tell embarrassing stories about one another.

So, here I am, watching The American President for the umpteenth time (it was okay the first thousand times it ran on Ted Turner's SuperStation), watching the James Bond movie marathon on TNT, and struggling through all the commercials for Orange Glo, George Foreman Grills, and all those other items that I just don't give a rat's ass about. There was that national dog show from Philly -- looking at all these dogs with bigger and poofier coifs than Farrah Fawcett in her heyday. And, oh joy -- avoiding that millionth rerun of Miracle on 34 Street and trying to remember that the adorble little girl there drowned as an oft-married adult a couple decades ago, after a party aboard her yacht of the coast of Catalina. But don't feel sorry for me. At least the turkey smells delicious. And the stuffing had just the right balance of spices when it went into the oven. I'll pass on the yams, but the mashed potatoes are fluffy and lite and ready for some gravy. And, hey, the pies smelled great first thing this morning, especially the mincemeat, and the rolls baking smelled mind-blowingly good.

But just think about this plot thing. I think I'm onto something -- and we have to guard against the influx of unwanted personal videos!.

Happy Thanksgiving

More soon.