Bartender! One Rijksuniversiteit Groningen over here!

Since Art Buchwald is dead, we now bring you Jules Crittenden’s Thanksgiving for Europeans, some of whom are so wrapped around the axle that they spend more time peevishly hating anything that they can remotely relate to America than selecting their festive garb.

I was just discussing some of our quaint customs in an email exchange with my Dutch pal Michael van der Galien. He’s in an American Studies program in Rotterdam or Amsterdam or some other dam place,* so I suggested he get a bunch of his clog-wearing dike-plugging buddies to stage a real American Thanksgiving. Sort of like World War II GI re-enacting or cowboy dressup, both popular among the Euros.

Because, you know, even though they like to give us a hard time, they actually love us and want to be like us. So here’s the deal.

Everyone has to dress like an American .. oversized football jerseys or tank-tops with baggy shorts and Nikes or Velcro sandals. High school football hero crewcut or blow-dired 1970a disco hair. Chinos and polo shirts and a new boy’s regular if you want to be more formal. Or wear your oversized baseball hat sideways and pants half off your ass. Oversized is pretty much the key to everything, unless you’re going the American nerd route, in which can everything must be symbolically too tight. Everyone’s going to need an American name. Earl’s the best one. Just call everyone Earl. Everyone has to act like an American … kind of clumsy and stupid, knocking things over … talk like an American … loud braying, with a lot of bragging and guffawing … use American table manners … pig-with-a-stick, mouth-open-while-chewing preferred. Ostentatious grace invoking the name of Jesus required. Some kind of family fight. I’d suggest a contentious abortion debate over dinner ending with gunplay.

Just as long as you use European weapons, which in spite of being an inanimate object which the same would concider innately bad in the same way a Prius is innately good, are something the argumentative would insist are of superior in quality. The best in the world. Better than yours’, as long as you aren’t asking. And you're especially wrong if you use them.