The most environmentally ethical way to deal with the waste of Thanksgiving feasts is to go to somebody else's house or a restaurant, so you can "let others worry about it." But millions of us who hosted the holiday dinner are now left with the additional work/guilt of doing something with all the rotting containers of increasingly gross five-day-old leftovers in the fridge.

The EPA says that "food waste" is now the "largest component of municipal solid waste being sent to landfills," at more than 33 million tons per year. That's good, because it means that recyclables like cardboard and aluminum and plastic are no longer the bulk of stuff [...]

"Tofurkey is offensive, linguistically and culturally. If you want to eat turkey, eat turkey. Tofu doesn't look or taste or smell like turkey at all. If you make tofu, own it and treat it like tofu and call it tofu." —Dr. James Hamblin, the Atlantic's health editor, answers all your Thanksgiving health questions about turkey skin, calories and taking a bowl of gravy and a pack of cigarettes to your childhood bedroom.

Hey, there sure were a lot of Current Events last week, eh? I mean, Twinkies and Petraeus, Middle East crap, sore losers in the Politics, the Weather (still) more Petraeus with the Benghazi thing, Fiscal Doom Cliff, man, I don’t know about you, but I am kind of tired of News, you know?

That’s why I am looking forward to This Week, because it is a "Short Week." For me, anyway. My Week this week equals Monday-through-Wednesday, and then there will be eating, through the Best and most American holiday, which is supposed to be for being Thankful for things, such as food, and gravy. Thanksgiving!

So I am Thankful [...]

You're not just going to be bored to death this holiday season: "[The] post-meal recovery period is being studied by scientists who are increasingly finding that what happens in the body after eating a big meal doesn't just bring on sleepiness, commonly known as food coma. It can also increase the risk of later health problems."

Out of compulsion, obligation or your own neurotic drive, you are hosting Thanksgiving this year. You know you have the experience and talent to pull it off, but you also know that the complexity of it—and your own high standards of performance—can sneak up on you, making the final hours before Thanksgiving dinner a tear-streaked melodrama of anxiety and disappointment.

So if you want to succeed without losing a finger, your sanity, or the weak familial bonds you still have, we need to start right away. For the next three weeks, your hand in mine, we are going to head into Thanksgiving with grace and confidence, getting enough [...]

While traditional Thanksgiving pies tend to be gourd-, nut- or cut hand fruit–based, I would contend that with yet another cold, dreary, interminable winter right around the corner, Thanksgiving is when we need a bright, sunshiny lemon meringue pie the most. Outside of the clearly necessary psychic boost it imparts, the reason I’ve been making lemon meringue pie since I was a kid is that it’s secretly very easy, but the folks who eat it can’t help but gush about how crafty and skilled a baker you are. For an insecure middle child desperately scratching for attention and familial approval at every opportunity, this fact is crucial, and [...]

My parents, whom I love dearly, are hurtling into their respective dotages, and their house is getting weird right along with them. It's not scary or sad or Hoarders-ey, so much as it's something you may recognize from your own place, only with a few decades more stuff and a very adorable little dog in the mix. What's at work here is a certain settling, I guess, that reflects an unspoken détente with all the piles of old paper and dusty shelved knicknackery. My parents' non-aggression pact with those lifetimes of stuff makes for a tense border in nearly every room, and their coexistence with their things is not [...]

Congratulations, everybody: Black Friday retail sales topped a billion dollars, which means everybody is rich and happy again. Whether shopping from a laptop in bed with a variety of empty bottles and pie crumbs or "at the actual store" with your fellow shoppers in their sweatpants, you helped make America great again.

How much greater? How about 26% better than Black Friday 2011! That is just a phenomenal amount of spending, for a phenomenal amount of consumer goods, electronics, gifts, and whatever else people buy. Pretty much everything is a Black Friday sales item in 2012. Cars? Oh hell yeah, go buy a car on Black [...]

My household is primarily ovo-lacto vegetarian, and I say "primarily" because I have small children who like those gross chicken lumps and fish sticks you find in your grocer's freezer, and also because it's nice to have a grilled, cedar-planked slab of wild-caught salmon on Thanksgiving. On the West Coast, you can do this outside on your grill, just like the Pacific Northwest tribes did for thousands of years before "Portlandia" and the Microsoft Surface tablet. In colder climates, you can broil the salmon in the oven if you don't have a coat? But this method does create the "burning flesh" smell so loathsome to delicate souls such [...]

ARE YOU READY? No of course you're not. Here, for you, some last minute inspirations, with gratitude from all of us. Don't hurt your families (unless they really deserve it, in which case, go to town).

DESSERT • Pie Crust. If we hear about any of you purchasing pie crusts, there'll be trouble.

• Cherry Clafoutis.

• Tardelle (aka Struffoli).

• Plumcot Yogurt Cake.

• Easy Lemon Meringue Pie.

• Lemon Squares.

• Pumpkin Flan.

• Tiramisu.

You guys, I couldn’t be prouder if I were a den mother ironing some gold arrow points on your scouting uniforms. You can head into the final seven days before Thanksgiving with your heads held high. When you get released from work early next Wednesday, you won’t be rushing to the grocery store. Instead, you’ll have time for an extended happy hour or to pick up your visitors from the airport, because your shopping is done, the sheets are pressed and dinner is waiting in the slow cooker. But even though you are in an advanced state of preparation, with little additional planning left to do, don’t yet retire [...]

My mom was a single mom, raising my brother and me with no help. She worked as an Art Director at department stores back when there were lots of ‘em, with in-house Art Departments, and then later she worked at Advertising Agencies. It was a lot like "Mad Men" still, in the Nineteen Hundred and Seventies, except there was no justice like on "Mad Men," where the ladies win one every once in a while. My mom worked early, late and weekends.

So she didn’t have the time or the inclination to cook in the kitchen like Betty fucking Crocker, and she had never really learned to cook Home [...]

I definitely think Thanksgiving is better than Passover. Although the latter has the edge in terms of length, elaborateness and specificity of the ritual meal, the former pulls ahead with better food (despite lacking charoset), and none of that “thank you god for bringing us out of Egypt by your mighty hand” business.

I stopped going to synagogue in high school (other than weddings and bar/bat mizvahs—benei mitzvah for those of you who like proper Hebrew pluralizations, cause yeah, I still got it), stopped fasting for Yom Kippur in college and was never very good at a week without leavened bread, but it took me several years after that [...]

So the argument at my Thanksgiving table this year centered around gay marriage; specifically, should gay marriage be something we affirm through the judicial process because it is a human right or should it be something we pass through the legislative process so we avoid another Roe v. Wade where people who would be opposed to it no matter what can pretend that they are bothered by it because it bypasses federalism or whatever? Now, granted, my Thanksgiving table was composed of decadent liberal Easterners, but as someone who has been around close to 40 Thanksgiving tables at this point I can guarantee you that this was a very new [...]

Not all turkeys will be overcooked and mostly ignored in favor of the tasty stuffing and wine this Thanksgiving. These birds live wild and free in Morro Bay, California—the feral turkeys hang around the golf course for a few hours, and then head down the stairs to the beach.

"When your relatives force you to look at photos on their phones, be thankful they no longer have access to a slide projector. When your aunt expounds on politics, rejoice inwardly that she does not hold elected office. Instead of focusing on the dry, tasteless turkey on your plate, be grateful the six-hour roasting process killed any toxic bacteria." —Science has some tips on how to handle Thanksgiving. Your main takeaway? Be more grateful. I can actually endorse this idea, although not necessarily in the way it is suggested here. My personal technique for coping with the holiday is to remind myself that even though I had the [...]