Mr. Roosevelt's Necktie

For my mother, who hosted Thanksgiving dinner last week: “Two years ago 41 people came to my house for Christmas dinner, some merchants and bishops and poets and 16 barbarians, mostly Goths and Visigoths, hairy savages who ate like swine, belching and shrieking, and spent the evening pillaging and plundering and left the place in ruins. We were picking food off the chandelier for weeks. And after I swept the refuse and sluiced out the dining room, I said, ‘No more savages for Christmas.’ Next year I invited only civilized people. It was a pleasant and orderly Christmas, but as the bishops and poets and merchants sat and drowsed over dessert, one poet piped up and said, ‘What happened to those little fellows who came last year, the ones who wiped their hands on the dog? They were a stitch! So uninhibited, throwing peas at each other! We talked about them for weeks afterward!’” – Garrison Keillor