Barry Tompkins: Another Thanksgiving with too much food, football

Don’t pay the ransom. I’ll try and escape.

I find myself this Friday prone on a sofa from which I cannot seem to extricate myself, nursing a bubbly glass of Alka Seltzer, and feeling as though I have eaten Cleveland.

I come from a long line of devout eaters. And, as our family grew, so did the Thanksgiving bounty. And along with that came the new age of vegans, pescatarians, pollotarians, carnivores and fruitarians. And we have at least one of each in our little tribe.

The end result of this is a table full of every form of digestible goodness (or badness, depending on one’s leanings) that could be found in a single dining location. The food takes up every flat surface and most of the seating so we as a family are left to march around the table like kids at a birthday party. The last person standing has to sit on the cranberry sauce.

For the omnivores in the house, of which I am one of three, it is incumbent upon us to have at least a single helping of everything from the cranberry sauce to the tofu and Brussel sprout casserole. And whatever is left of the turkey, which is to say — all of it.

That is followed by a slow retreat to the sofa in which I am currently entrenched to watch a melange of football games none of which would I be remotely interested in unless I were a betting man. Sadly I’m not.

But I’m also too full to get up and change the channel to something far more interesting. Like Family Feud or SpongeBob SquarePants.

In the back of my mind I have to think Thanksgiving day was a lot easier to navigate back in the 1620’s. The simple fact is this. In those days it was all about the food. Nobody ever bothered to turn the TV on for the football games because A) there was no football, and B) TV wasn’t going to be invented for nearly 300 years — and the Pilgrims and their guests the Wampanoag people were not about to make small talk while waiting for Netflix to replay the Last of the Mohicans.

In fact, there almost never was a Thanksgiving 2.0 for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags. After eating everything that wasn’t nailed down at that first gathering, a drought set in and was about to have a devastating affect on the crops.

But then Governor Bradford of the Pilgrims called for a day of religious fasting and prayer to ask God to end the drought.

And God came through again. Before the Pilgrims could so much as grab a nosh out of the fridge to break the fast, it poured. The crops prospered. They called the Wampanoag almost immediately and said, “T’giving is on. You guys bring the venison, ducks and turkey and we’ll chip in with a couple of pumpkins and a pot of beans.”

The Wampanoag were excited. Their first thought was “I didn’t know they had cell service.” The Pilgrims meanwhile decided they should have this feast to thank God for bringing the rain. The Wampanoags said, “What’s his last name? We want to write a thank you note.”

So the Pilgrims and Wampanoags broke bread together once again. And gave thanks for the plentiful bounty of food. It was an early evening. Remember — no football games. The Wampanoags left with but one request. They asked that the Pilgrims refer to them hereto forth as the Commanders.

Forty or so years later, the Pilgrims were rolling. They had established a nice little colony. A rivalry with those other Dutch settlers, the New Amsterdam colony who had bought a lousy little island for a few bucks and settled there. Today the two colonies are known as the Red Sox and the Yankees.

The Wampanoag weren’t quite so lucky. Fifty years after that first feast, 40% of the tribe had died. Many were sold into slavery. But the elders remembered the good old days, and when the young braves would sit around the fire they’d be regaled at the wizened tones of those who came before them: “That was the best dang pot of beans I’ve ever eaten.”

Now, as I lie here in my caloric stupor, I long for those days when the land was the province of the Native Americans despite those interlopers from the New World.

Come to think of it, I think I’ll watch the Chiefs-Cowboys game.

Barry Tompkins is a 40-year network television sportscaster and a San Francisco native. Email him at barrytompkins1@gmail.com.