Salted and Styled

A Thanksgiving Primer

When I was ten, mom bought me a set of Christopher Columbus paper dolls from one of those newsprint Scholastic mailers. The punch-out dolls consisted of a dozen or so white men and a handful of natives, but I didn’t know what to do with them. This predated the PC police and Lies My Teacher Told Me, so I didn’t yet know that “discovery” is a euphemism for taking what isn’t rightfully yours. In other words, I didn’t have Columbus and his men fight with the natives; instead, they sat down together for the first Thanksgiving dinner.