I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Thanksgiving is the best of all possible holidays. I present in evidence the fact that all your major chain stories skip it. Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, they all go straight from the big money holiday of Halloween to the super gargantuan, mother of all fiscal boosts, Christmas.

This can only mean there is something so pure and good about Thanksgiving that it resists commercialism. Oh sure, the powers that be have tried to assimilate Turkey Day, but it resists. Holiday specials paled in comparison to the Grinch and Charlie Brown.

This is due partly to the fact that Thanksgiving has a pretty tame color scheme. It is hard to manipulate people’s emotions with 50 shades of brown from the fiery dead oak leaf brown to the subtle and sophisticated burnt sienna. These colors take on a macabre tone at Halloween, but by Thanksgiving, they are just sedate. Even if we could invent another 1000 shades, brown is still brown and just makes people sleepy.

Contrast this with the endless possibilities of Christmas with its crimson, evergreen, silver and gold. Wrapping paper, tinsel, candles, toys. Christmas is like the cocaine of holidays, one quick shot and you’re wired for hours.

In spite of all that hyper stimulation, nothing beats the purity of a holiday that its only purpose is getting together with the family to reflect on how lucky we really are, eat the best meal of the year and occasionally point the finger of blame for our dysfunction squarely at everyone in attendance.

Considering the awesome simplicity of Thanksgiving, how could anyone in their right mind think Pilgrims invented it? Pilgrims were too busy accusing each other of being witches, obsessing over whose buckles shined so much they offended our lord and not bathing to come up with holidays that rocked.

Like potatoes, tobacco, chocolate, kayaks and serial monogamy, all the cool stuff was invented by Indians. Looking to see how Thanksgiving got rolling, people WANT to believe white folks started it. Since they killed off most of the witnesses, it behooves us still living to stand up and say, “Pilgrims couldn’t have invented Thanksgiving if Jesus Christ himself commanded them to do so.” Think about it. If any sin is well-represented at Thanksgiving, it’s gluttony.

But you get a group of wild Calvinists together in the woods for a banquet, some dude in a funny hat says a prayer and half the credit for Thanksgiving is yours. What a rip.

One of the many inaccurate theories about Turkey Day’s origin is that the pilgrims got the idea from the Hebrews. The Israelites used to have a little festival after the harvest to praise Jehovah for delivering them from Egypt. Sounds good, but it’s a stretch.

Governor Bradford of the Plymouth colony had good examples closer to “home.”

There is no tribe of Indians on this continent that didn’t celebrate the harvest with a feast. If Bradford “got the idea” from anyone, it was Squanto.

We all know those Puritans were starving to death. They couldn’t grow corn to save their lives, and if it hadn’t been for Squanto, the last of the Pawtuxet Indians and his mad farming skills, those Pilgrims would have died sure as they stunk and hated Injuns.

Historians are all too happy to give credit to the intrepid white land-grabbers of this nation’s past. If it weren’t for dumb luck and the fact that the rest of the Pawtuxet had been wiped out by another fabulous gift of the English, smallpox, Squanto would probably have been happily engaged in the business of living it up with the rest of his tribe.

The image of Puritans and Indians happily gathered together to chow down and play games is ludicrous. Bradford invited Chief Massasoit of the Wampanoags to come by himself to seal a peace treaty Squanto set up for him. The cheeky savage invited 90 of his best buddies to come with him, and you just know it was because he was afraid of getting jacked or he would have brought some women. Let’s face it. He wasn’t counting on scoring with any of those uptight Puritan fishwives.

One of the very first peace treaties lasted about 20 years because that’s how long it took these losers to get enough supplies and guts to start killing the peace-loving Wampanoags.

Of course, the Indians provided most of the food. Massasoit’s men killed five deer for the feast. Now that’s a whole lot of venison. Considering the Indians disdain for wastefulness, you can bet good money this meat was essential to the feed. Even if it wasn’t, the corn was Squanto’s, and I can’t imagine a Pilgrim knowing what to do with the stuff.

Even all the fanciful versions of Puritanical generosity include Indian bread, wild roots, shellfish and geese. Can you honestly imagine anyone bagging geese with a blunderbuss? Bows and arrows are much more accurate over long ranges. And what about the shellfish? Bradford and his band of loonies couldn’t have been bothered to get THEIR knickers wet.

In the years that followed, the colonists often celebrated Thanksgiving every time they wiped out another tribe or grabbed a few more acres of land.

Of course, none of this explains why the Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving, too. Their theories are even more uncertain. One even credits the French, and that has to be wrong.

This candy-coated nonsense we’ve all been fed since we were making turkeys out of hand prints in grade school does a mean disservice to people who truly knew the meaning of thankfulness for bounty.

Still and all, I like Thanksgiving the best. If we have all deluded ourselves into thinking it’s just about sweetness and light and good family values, there are worse things to be deluded about.

So this holiday season, chow down, feel blessed, watch football, blame grandma for your inability to commit, fall asleep on the couch and give a little credit where credit is due.