Thanksgiving Day With My Family

From the Pastor:    Thanksgiving Day With My Family

       Here I am the week before Thanksgiving having to type out this bulletin article in order to get the bulletin printed for the following Sunday before the office staff goes home for the holiday. I am fortunate in the respect that I have much practice in writing about future events before they actually happen, especially when it comes to outings with my family, so that I don’t have to wait an extra week before letting you all know how things went. So here is my Thanksgiving story.
       Several weeks before Thanksgiving we received a letter from Aunt Irma. She is living in Michigan under the covid dictator who has abused, berated, threatened, and punished the populace into submission to the new religion-superstition commonly called Fauciism, and her Stockholm syndrome was showing itself in full color. In her letter, she stated that she would not attend any family gathering unless all family members, even the ones who would not be present (which makes as much sense as anything else dealing with the jab, since the official battle cry is, “Your lack of vaccination is making my vaccinations fail!”) were double or triple jabbed with the genetic engineering experimental thingamabob. Because she, being a Whitmer victim/survivor, was so full of self-righteousness, and because she correctly believes that she is the favorite matriarch of our family, she was sure that we would all dutifully agree to get sterilized—I mean inoculated with the thing that can only be called a vaccine because “experts” changed the definition of a vaccine after they started injecting guinea-people with it—before her arrival. How silly! While we would miss her terribly, the general thinking was simply, “I get dibs on the extra turkey drumstick!” 
       So while we were all gathered at my sister’s house having a few libations, munching on way too many appetizers, and grousing about the lies and fear being pedaled all day every day by the government, media, woke corporations, and the USCCB, the last person in the world whom we expected to arrive came bursting through the door, dutifully wearing her two masks, plastic face shield, and a tee shirt emblazoned with “Your body, My choice! Mandate now!” Aunt Irma was in the house! After she had realized that she could not Michiganize any of us into taking “the jab that makes you fear non-jabbed healthy people” (none of us Floridians, by the way, were condemning the others for either having or lacking proper jab id, for we all just sighed in exasperation at those who did the opposite of what we did—kind of like normal people used to do—instead of canceling them) she concocted her own special plan for covid safety: she just got herself jabbed and jabbed again and then again and again and again. She counted out how many relatives she suspected to be going without the injection and then she simply went from pharmacy to pharmacy getting “boosted” for each one who rejected the shot. She said that she had received 17 boosters, but that she had lost count around 12 and might have been off by one or two after that. But she was convinced that, temporarily, she need not fear the unvaxed, for her extra vaccinations canceled them out. She figures that will change soon enough, though, and she expects to face lockdowns once again this winter back home, because by Christmas her state will probably be manding an 18th shot to be considered “fully vaxed.” She is, of course, OK with that because, well, you know, “the science.”
       There was one problem that she hadn’t managed to solve, though, and that was the non-vaccination status of the turkey. In her now-altered mind (from too many hours watching CNN, which did countless more damage than 17 booster shots) she “knew” that covid had come from eating unvaccinated bats in Wuhan, and she figured that a turkey is just a much larger version of a bat, so she was petrified that she would catch covid if she ate the turkey. And she loved the rest of us so much that she made a big deal out of the “fact” that we, too, were all going to die if we ate that sickly winged creature. It didn’t help at all that my brother-in-law had mentioned that he brined the bird overnight, which Aunt Irma equated with the infamous Chinese wet market. We really wanted to just be able to have a great feast in peace with the family, but we were at a loss as to what to do to pacify her. Somebody pulled out a vaccination card and tried to pass it off as the bird’s “safety inspection covid label” but it still had his name on it, so Aunt Irma wasn’t fooled. We were just about at wit’s end, unable to get her to change the topic and unwilling to listen to any more “you’re all going to die and you’re trying to kill me, too!” nonsense when one of the kids remembered watching her dad prepare the turkey. Not only did he brine it, but he injected a slurry of spices deep within the meat using a rather large syringe. She brought that out to show Aunt Irma that the turkey had indeed been vaccinated before it went into the smoker and she witnessed her daddy inject it multiple times, so it must be fully, not just partially, vaccinated! That did the trick. Aunt Irma, full of enough vax to make up for each of us, was happy to eat a rather large, wet market bat/bird thing for Thanksgiving, since it, too, was fully vaxxed. A win for “the science” and a win for the family.

With prayers for your holiness,
Rev. Fr. Edwin Palka
       

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