Good morning and greetings, December fans. Yes, the Thanksgiving holiday has come and gone, as records were shattered in the consumption of stuffing department. I am left with a very pleasant memory, along with 72 cans of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce to commemorate this blessed occasion.

To year round cranberry sauce lovers, I say, crave the wave. Your taste buds will thank you.

Now in last week’s post, I looked ahead to the holiday, previewing how others celebrated this glorious gathering of food and stress. So with the sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and green beans now just a low carb memory, I thought I would take a look back at the holiday that brings some families together while ripping others apart.

As I’ve always maintained, be someone that brings out the best in you, not the stress in you.

Now first of all, the Pilgrims did not celebrate this festival with Trader Joe’s turkey gravy. Back in 1621, they decided to throw themselves a rave party to celebrate the harvest, so for the fixings, the men went “fowling,” as in the hunting of wild birds. Then a group of Wampanoag Indians showed up with five deer and enough deviled eggs, spinach dip and stuffed mushrooms for 50.

Looking back upon this first feast, the menu was quite exotic for the times. There was lobster, fish, sushi, chicken, rabbit, flank steak, squashes, dried fruits, aging movie stars, eggs, goat cheese, tater tots, chestnuts, hickory nuts, shrimp toast and spring rolls.

Not making it to the table were mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, bagels, corn on the cob, cranberries, whitefish salad and the most important item, gravy, which we all know is a key component to the success of the meal. And no forks were used for this feast, as this utensil didn’t make an appearance in North American until the 19th century. So we’re talking spoons, knives, fingers, chopsticks and slingshots.

Historians say the party raged on for three days, and included the 50 surviving Pilgrims and 90 Indians, as they ate, played party games, shot guns for fun and watched football and the Macy’s Day Parade.

Now according to my sources in the South Pacific, long before the Pilgrims set sail on the Mayflower, native Hawaiians were celebrating the longest Thanksgiving in the world. This holiday was called Makahiki, and lasted four months, from November through February. During these months of celebration, work, war, surf contests and reruns of “Magnum, P.I.” were forbidden.

So there was no mention of turkey at this original Thanksgiving. And let’s face it, when we think about this holiday, turkey is the number one bird on the hit list. The great American statesmen, Ben Franklin, wanted the turkey to be the national bird of the United States. Me, I always favored the peacock.

So here’s a few fun facts about the approximately 45 million turkeys that were consumed and then exhumed on Thanksgiving.

There is evidence that turkeys have been around for 10 million years, or right around the making of the pilot episode of “Law and Order.”

Only male turkeys can pull off the gobble gobble routine, which is a seasonal call that drives the females crazy during their mating periods. Hens prefer to cluck, like in get me the cluck out of here.

Domesticated turkeys, or farm raised, cannot fly. So they go Amtrak. The heaviest turkey ever raised weighed in at a hefty 86 pounds, about the size of a large German Shepard or an small Austrian sheep herder.

Now here’s an unusual fact. Due to white meat being the most delectable and popular part of the turkey, these large birds have been bred to have huge breasts. As a result, the female’s backs are always killing them.

Now this takes all the fun out of the equation for both sexes because the domesticated turkeys are no longer able to mate, due to the breasts getting in the way of the mounting of the female. So they have to settle for a romantic dinner, a movie, then on to some heavy petting before they call it a night. Chickens have all the luck.

And finally, let’s give a shout out to Sara Josepha Hale, a magazine editor who is the author of the popular nursery rhyme, “Mary had a little lamb.” She urged President Lincoln to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving, as until 1863, the holiday had not been celebrated annually since the first feast back in 1621. She believed the day would unite Americans in the midst of dramatic social and industrial change and awaken our hearts for love and home and country.

And most importantly, it would create a day for Americans to wake up at the crack of dawn, so they can get in line to wait for the stores to open at great malls of our nation. We know it as Black Friday, a consumer’s dream come true, and just the way God created it. Because only in America, do people trample other for sales exactly one day after being thankful for what they already have.

So for our holiday photo session, we are returning to Thanksgiving morning, 2014. I had slept in till 6:30, but when I saw that red glow on the eastern horizon, I dashed out of the house, parked the car at Bird Rock and sprinted down West Cliff to catch the amazing glow of the red clouds above Monterey Bay, before catching the sunrise over at Steamer Lane. Just a spectacular way to the start off the holiday.

On to some best of late night humor. “Yesterday New Jersey Governor Chris Chistie was asked about the slow pace of his weight loss and said, quote, ‘Rome was not un-built in a day.’ In fact, Christie and Rome have a lot in common: one was built by Julius Caesar, and the other was built by LITTLE Caesar.” – Jimmy Fallon “Ted Cruz of course, was furious that the big storm back east shut down the government. He said, ‘That my job!’ But you know, there is a big difference between Ted Cruz and snow. Both are white and everyone’s sick of them – but eventually snow goes away.” – Bill Maher

“The Arizona legislature passed a bill that would allow business owners asserting their religious beliefs to deny service to gay customers. Some businesses have already put up signs that read: ‘Nice shirt, nice shoes, no service.'” – Seth Meyers “Presidents Day, of course, started out as celebration of Washington’s birthday. Then someone remembered it was Lincoln’s birthday on the 12th. So now we celebrate Washington, Lincoln and all the other Presidents. I have no idea how this led to mattress sales. It’s probably something do with Bill Clinton.” – Craig Ferguson

“Yesterday the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks advanced to the big game, which means this year’s Super Bowl will have teams from the two states where recreational marijuana is legal. Or as pizza delivery men put it, ‘Pray for us.'” After the president’s State of the Union address, there will be three separate Republican rebuttals. Obama said, ‘Yeah, I live with two daughters, my wife and my mother-in-law. Three people telling me I’m wrong is a holiday.'” – Jimmy Fallon

So welcome to December. We’ll catch doubling your scoring average for the third straight season while nailing the three ball. Aloha, mahalo and later, Draymond Green fans.

Good morning and greetings, turkey day fans. According to my Nicki Minaj desktop calendar, Thanksgiving is coming up on Thursday. For most, it is a week filled with joy, as families reunite and share in a bounty of food, drink and tryptophan. My favorite amino acid helps the body in making niacin, an important B vitamin, which works well as both a floor wax and a dessert topping.

So this week, the airports are packed and people take to the highways like lemmings. Or as the late, great Johnny Carson once observed, “Thanksgiving is an emotional holiday. People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year. And then they discover once a year is too often.” Hiyo.

Now when I look back into my blogging archives, it seems that I wax nostalgic about my favorite national holiday in the even years, as in 2010, 2012 and 1846.

So for today, I hope you’ll pardon me if I bring back some of the greatest celebrities quotes and a few new ones about this festival of turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes and enough stuffing to fill the Grand Canyon.

So Thanksgiving is always a November to remember, as uncontrolled violence, er football, takes center stage on this holiday. Or as comedian John Caponera put it, ‘Who knew the Pilgrims liked football so much?”

It’s a time of bonding, when relatives and friends come together. Jon Stewart, coming off his directorial debut of his new movie, “Rosewater,” grew up in the Garden State of New Jersey and enjoys reminiscing about the holiday. “I celebrated in an old fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then killed them and took their land.”

It seems that the Indians got a raw deal in this whole Thanksgiving story. Or as Native American comedian Larry Omaha puts it, “My mother won’t celebrate Thanksgiving. She says it represents the white man stealing our land. But she’s not angry, she figures, what the hell, we’re taking it back one casino at a time.”

For the host family, a good part of the day is spent in the foxhole, better known as the kitchen, preparing for a feast that will be prepared by a few, eaten by many and cleaned up by less. Unfortunately, many people will go hungry on this day, and that is a sin. No one in America should go hungry.

Or as Mother Theresa once tweeted me from a Backstreet Boys concert, ‘If you can’t feed 100 people, feed one.”

There is something vaguely satisfying about putting together a meal that feeds so many. I just love cramming stuffing into the bird’s cavity, as the instructions always say to ‘lightly stuff” the bird.

Well, after I finish jackhammering the delightfully flavored mix of bread crumbs, celery, and unions into the self basting butterball, I place it in a plastic bag, and it does all the work. It’s like magic. There’s a great future in plastics.

Or as Roseanne Barr once described the filling of the crevice, “Here I am at five o’clock in the morning, stuffing bread crumbs up a dead bird’s butt.”

George Carlin had this take on the holiday. “We’re having something a little different this year for Thanksgiving. Instead of a turkey, we’re having a swan. You get more stuffing.” And it’s always so moist.

So it makes for a long day, but it only comes around once a year, and you have 365 days to recover from it. It can be a little stressful when the families reunite. Or as Stephen Colbert once noted, “Personally, I love Thanksgiving traditions: watching football, making pumpkin pie, and saying the magic phrase that sends your aunt storming out of the dining room to sit in her car.”

Thanksgiving is celebrated by most all in America, from the common working stiff to high profile celebrities in Hollywood. Former California governor Arnold Schwarzeneger, who is busy man due to the double family front on this occasion, made a keen observation when he quipped, “I love the Thanksgiving turkey…it’s the only time in Los Angeles that you see natural breasts.”

Now my favorite TV talk show host, David Letterman, is retiring from the late night wars sometime in 2015. He will be missed. Here’s his take on the holiday. “Thanksgiving is the day when you turn to another family member and say, ‘How long has Mom been drinking like this?’ My mom, after six Bloody Marys, looks at the turkey and says, ‘Here kitty, kitty.'”

As the world know, David Letterman is a huge admirer of the world’s most powerful woman, Oprah Winfrey. As I’ve said before, Oprah is a saint, a woman with a huge heart that overflows with love and generosity. She changes lives on a daily basis, and if you want to model yourself after someone, the Big O would be a good starting point.

This is her thought on the day. ‘Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never have enough.” Or as comedian Kevin James once spouted, “Thanksgiving. Not a good day to be my pants.”

Which leads me to the words of writer William A. Ward, who so eloquently once said, “God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?”

Well, I believe I have. I am particularly thankful for my health and the health of my family and friends. But I would also like the give thanks to you, the readers of this blog, who take time out each week to decipher whatever humorous thoughts sprint across my mind. It’s all about the laughter. The photos are the icing on the cake.

So for my final thoughts on this day before we celebrate Black Friday, I will defer to one of the funniest and palest men in American, comedian Jim Gaffigan, to put the holiday in the proper prospective. “Thanksgiving. It’s like we didn’t even try to come up with a tradition. The tradition is, we overeat. ‘Hey, how about at Thanksgiving we just eat a lot?’ ‘But we do that every day!’ ‘Oh. What if we eat a lot with people that annoy the hell out of us?'”

So in honor of the turkey day, for our photo follies, we are featuring a cluster of their distant cousins, the pelican. The day was November 14th, and I had heard a rumor of a mass gathering at Natural Bridges State Beach. Sure enough, they were packed in on the rocks like sardines and with the gulls down on the sand.

We then return to November of last year, as we head down to the Municipal Wharf and take in a couple of outrageous feeding frenzy moments, as the birds were going anchovie crazy. There was non-stop action with the volume turned up.

We then move on to a big flock of pelicans in flight heading north before we finish up with a delightful shot along West Cliff Drive of these amazing birds moving through the sun as it dips into the horizon.

On to some late night humor. “There are reports that leaders from ISIS and al-Qaida met at a farm house in Syria last week, and agreed to work together against their common enemies. That story again: Two radical terrorist groups managed to do what two American political parties cannot. The Keystone XL pipeline would run from Canada to the Gulf Coast. It’ll be the biggest underground structure leading into the U.S. Then people in Mexico said, “Eh . . . second biggest.” – Jimmy Fallon

I don’t know if you know this but Hitler was a painter and one of his watercolor paintings is being auctioned off. It’s expected to sell for over $60,000. So if you’re looking for a wedding gift for Charles Manson.”- Conan O’Brien “Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln wrote it on his way to the site of the speech on the back of an envelope. One guy on the back of an envelope wrote the great Gettysburg Address — while every night it takes six guys to write this crap!” -David Letterman

“Germany has overtaken the United States as the world’s favorite country. The favorite country survey was based on more than 20,000 people in 20 countries. Isn’t it a little bit unfair that they did this before the McRib came back?” -Jimmy Kimmel “David Bowie’s new album is a greatest hits collection called “Nothing Has Changed.” On the cover he looks in the mirror and he says nothing has changed. When I look in the mirror I say, “Hello, grandpa.” – Craig Ferguson

“Scientists say the European space probe that landed on the comet has detected organic matter. This means there could be either life in space or a Whole Foods. We just don’t know. This week a group of activists, known as Anonymous, hacked the Twitter account of the KKK. The KKK is furious. They said Anonymous is just a bunch of cowards who don’t have the courage to show their faces.” – Conan O’Brien “A man in California was arrested after he stabbed his potential employer during a job interview. Well, at least now he knows where he sees himself in five years.” – Seth Meyer

So that’s my big holiday post. Enjoy this gathering for what it is and perhaps take a moment to think about the military families that are apart on Thanksgiving.

We’ll catch you slinging touchdown passes and putting up big numbers on the board week after week. Aloha, mahalo and later, Aaron Rogers fans.