INSULT TO INJURY: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THANKSGIVING? PART TWO: THE COMEBACK

When I was a kid, my mother's family -- her siblings and their broods -- got together, rented out a hall and had a Thanksgiving bash that would've embarrassed Epicurus for its sheer consumption. It was the most exciting Thanksgiving I ever had.

It didn't start out that way. By midafternoon, as all the menfolk began unbuckling their trousers and wondering aloud what could've possibly possessed them to have that third helping of Aunt Eloise's cornbread-oyster stuffing, we kids got bored.

A couple of my cousins, both just this side of delinquency and always itching to cross over the line, talked my brother and me into climbing off our exalted moral perch and participating in a bit of petty larceny. So while the adults tried to out-do one another in the belch-and-complain contest, we sneaked a dozen or so pies off the dessert table, out the back door and to the railroad tracks behind the building.

For the rest of the afternoon we made ourselves sick on pie, pie and more pie. Pumpkin, cherry, apple. Chocolate even. We left the mince meat and gooseberry for the adults. After all, we didn't want to be selfish and take it all.

The pie was good. But the adventure was better.

It was that adventure that set the day apart from the routine, typical Thanksgivings of my youth. And therein lies the solution for saving Thanksgiving for an easily bored citizenry -- adventure.

Think of Thanksgiving and what do you imagine? Sober and solemn Pilgrims standing before a table, their hands outstretched to welcome the natives. Then, with grateful hearts for the wonderful bounty set before them, they sit together for a peaceful feast.

Yawn.

Not much to recommend it for a culture more interested in style than in substance. No glitz, no pizzazz. Nothing to get the blood pumping and the heart racing. In short, a crashing bore.

Thanksgiving is really a Norman Rockwell kind of holiday, replete with Capraesque characters and quaint as a curtsy. But, for better or worse, we no longer live in that sort of Rockwell-Frank Capra world.

Even little kids are likely to get bored by the whole Thanksgiving ordeal. Raised on video games like "Mortal Combat" or "Resident Evil 2" where the object is to decapitate, disembowel or otherwise dissect your opponent, they easily grow weary of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, where the main attractions are 70-foot helium-filled replicas of Bullwinkle and Underdog, especially if the whole event is hosted by anyone even closely resembling Regis and Kathie Lee.

So how best to overcome this yawning passivity? Can we generate Thanksgiving fervor in a society that only seems to cheer the screaming excess of Jerry Springer and the World Wrestling Federation?

Why not breathe life into the holiday by intermingling Thanksgiving with popular trends. Surely some clever marketing could resuscitate national enthusiasm. What pimply faced technologically savvy prepubescent could resist a video game called "Mortal Pilgrim: Revenge of the Turkey"?

How about a Springer episode: "Transsexual Turkeys and the Women who Baste Them"? Or a special evening of "Wrestling in Giblet Gravy -- the Battle for the Drumstick"?

Or, if Thanksgiving is losing its status as the all-American holiday, why not tie it to the all-American sport. Surely there's an audience willing to watch Mark McGwire slam a can of cranberry sauce out of the park.

Or perhaps, remembering the contribution of those oh-so-proper Pilgrims, the original Thanksgiving revelers, we might institute a new and unyielding rule:

YOU MAY EAT ONLY WHAT YOU KILL.

Extreme, perhaps, but it promises drama. When guests begin to arrive for the annual feast, supply them with hearty muskets, point them thither to yonder woods and wait for dinner to show up oozing blood and full of buckshot. Yum!

Be creative, folks. If things continue as they have been going, this may be the last year for Thanksgiving as we know it. As sophisticated as we are apparently becoming, the very notion of giving thanks may have disappeared over the river and through the woods.

~Jeffrey Jackson is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.