It used to be that, not long ago, Thanksgiving was a brief, one-day event.  You ate turkey in the afternoon, watched football into the evening, then went back to work the next day, and life went on.  Fast-forward three decades later.  Today, the holiday stretches out for eleven straight days, starting the Friday before the Thanksgiving day week, clogging roads with $100,000-plus R.V.s and Volvo hatchbacks with Thule roof racks.  It then consumes the entire week thereafter, bookended by two weekends.  I used to wonder who these people were.  Now I know. 

Perhaps it's because I notice it more by being so close to a government town that just keeps growing the size of the public sector at the expense of everyone else.  Sacramento is probably the most corrupt state capital in the nation.  The public sector gets nearly four months off every year!  Meanwhile, working stiffs behind convenience store registers get maybe one or two weeks.  God forbid you are too unintelligent to figure this out and decide to work for yourself.  Then you get none. 

Is it any wonder that our GDP barely scratches 2%?

Today, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, a full two days before the actual holiday itself, the freeways look like The Omega Man.  It's so devoid of traffic that you could pretend you were on the Autobahn after a post-apocalyptic nuclear war.  Perhaps our society is just a lot more thankful than it used to be, and people want to do more Plymouth Rock re-enactments or have gravy boat-guzzling competitions and crush beige Coors Banquet Edition empties on their heads.  Doesn't everyone need a full week and a half off to reflect on their Dollar Tree cornucopia table settings?

But it is not just Thanksgiving.  Public school teachers take the day off after Halloween now.  Perhaps we should be more focused on when teachers are actually seen, in the classroom, as in rarely, like a Bigfoot sighting.  There are a lot of these strange, seemingly random teacher hibernations in any one calendar year either preceding or following a holiday, or without any holiday at all.  They usually tell us they are busy doing some "teacher" things like "crafting for the classroom" or training or working off a hangover or... whatever. 

It's almost like in Office Space, when Peter Gibbons does the "in any given week" speech.  "I probably do about 15 minutes of actual work."