I was visiting some family over the Thanksgiving break, and someone turned the TV news on for a few minutes. One of their “Breaking News” stories was that there was a lot of holiday travel on Thanksgiving. That’s not really news, since everyone knows it will happen, and it’s not breaking news because it was already predicted and known.

I’ve seen a lot of other mundane things be called “breaking news” before. One time the President’s plane was landing in Philadelphia. I don’t keep up with his travel schedule, so I wondered if something was wrong. Nope, that was where he was going. He was just traveling to a meeting. So I don’t see how it’s even news. Does anyone need to know? Was there nothing more relevant happening that day?

I understand that the news networks want to keep their viewers “engaged” [i.e., glued to the TV / radio / stream all the time] so they want “breaking news”, and they sometimes manufacture drama, but instead of all that, why don’t they actually report interesting and/or relevant news? There’s a lot of good things that happen in the world each day. It seems like these days some of the most popular mainstream news sources just try to incite anger toward a particular political party by blaming all the problems on that one group of people. (I’ll stop the rant on that before it gets going, but let me remind you that biased reporting like that is called propaganda. News is reporting the facts of what happened, not casting blame on that “other party”. Look to see if your preferred news sources do this. Both sides do it.)

Whoops! Started to rant there. My bad! Back on topic, here’s some “breaking news” about Thanksgiving — many people ate a lot and had a good time doing it! 🙂

Here’s some Thanksgiving-related news… at a family get-together I attended, someone brought cheese dip with sausage in it. I think there was some slight befuddlement at that, since it’s not a traditional side dish at Thanksgiving. But it’s not like green beans and corn are anything special on their own. Besides, cheese dip proved to be beneficial since the turkey was on the dry side. (I’m not complaining — it’s hard to cook a turkey well, and it was still good — especially with the cheese dip.)

Here’s another point along those lines. There’s nothing inherently wrong with tradition and having the same foods for Thanksgiving each year. I’m glad we always have dressing/stuffing, since it’s rare and delicious. But it’s better to not let tradition keep us from making things better. It’s good to ask, “How can we make our Thanksgiving meal more awesome?” Keep what’s already great, but don’t be afraid to add new items or change things up if it improves the experience. The holiday meal is not great just because of tradition — it’s great because of good-tasting food and enjoyable fellowship with family. So make it awesome!