Happy Friends & Family Day

That damn Granny makes you eat off real china!

In their ongoing effort to distance themselves from us geezers, today's young people are opting to forgo the traditional Thanksgiving holiday with their hated families and instead spend it with their friends. They even gave it a new name: Friendsgiving. That makes perfect sense, since in these Facebook days, friends are everything: How many you pretend-have counts, even if most of them aren't worth a damn and would not lift a finger for you, forget helping you move. (I know this is true because my son is one of them and I hear stories.)

Anyway, I first heard the term last week when the 23-year-old daughter of a neighbor said she was having 20 people over for Friendsgiving at her house, but she was planning to use paper plates because she damn well wasn't going to waste all that time washing dishes. (Her mother and I tried to dissuade her, to no avail.) Soon after I read an article online advising that for Friendsgiving--the very word is hard to say and so pretentious I may toss my stuffing-- everyone should divide up all the work or else "it could be a real shitshow." Having never before heard or read that expression, I thought it was just something the writer came up with, but I looked it up in the urban slang dictionary and learned it's been around since 2005. It means "hectic and frenetic," or "a mess." If you ask me, with words like that entering the lexicon, the human race is definitely one of those.

And just for the record, all you Gen Xers or whatever letter they are now, we Baby Boomers have been inviting our friends for Thanksgiving since Eve popped out of Adam and we never called it anything else, since having friends who feel like family is what friendship once was in our day.