Wednesday, November 22, 2017

No. 211: Thanksgrieving Song

On to the highway, past shopping malls,
to see Grandma at the home.
Is this the way? 
Don't tell her you're gay!
Stop texting on the phone.
On to the highway, past shopping malls...
(Why DID we 
have kids, anyway?)
In we will pop, then we'll go to shop.
Sales start on Thanksgiving Day.

(with apologies to Lydia Maria Francis Child* who wrote the version we sang in grammar school.)
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*Lydia Maria Francis Child (born Lydia Maria Francis) (February 11, 1802 – October 20, 1880), was an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism. [Sufficient reasons, these, for our never having heard of her. Redundant, though. Her being a woman and all. No cheating. DO NOT LOOK AT BEGINNING OF PARAGRAPH! What was her name? (Yeah, me too.)]

Her journals, both fiction and domestic manuals, reached wide audiences from the 1820s through the 1850s. At times she shocked her audience as she tried to take on issues of both male dominance and white supremacy in some of her stories.


Despite these challenges, Child may be most remembered for her poem "Over the River and Through the Wood." Her grandparents' house, which she wrote about visiting, was restored by Tufts University in 1976 and stands near the Mystic River on South Street, in Medford, Massachusetts. — Wikipedia (more)