THANKSGIVING OPEN THREAD: Who Wants a Holiday Hug?
Feature image from Shutterstock.
Hello, Schnitzels and Noodles! Welcome to your Thanksgiving Open Thread, which will also serve as your Friday Open Thread this holiday week! This is the place where we hang out together to share stories and photos and videos and love and advice and brain hugs. I feel like a lot of us need some extra huggin’ this week.
So this is my first time hosting at Autostraddle Open Thread, and I’ll be honest with you: I’m a little bit nervous! One of the things I am most thankful for this year is that the stars aligned and allowed me to join the staff of the Greatest Website of Our Generation, something I’ve been wanting to do for longer than I can even remember. All of the writers and editors and readers here have made me feel so at home, and there’s not even one single hour of the day when I am not gobsmacked (right in the face!) by an overwhelming sense of gratitude that I get to exist right in the middle of a group of people who wake up every day asking themselves how they can be better and do better, how they can actually change the shape of the world. And so thank you for reaching out and internet hugging me so good.
I am spending Thanksgiving today with just my girlfriend, and while I’ll miss my family back home in Georgia, I cherish these moments in our crazy busy lives when it’s just me and Stacy in our pajamas for three straight days, eating macaroni and cheese with hot sauce, and cuddling up to read or watch TV or joke our inside jokes until we’re laugh-crying at what anyone else would think is the dumbest thing. She is my favorite hug-giver on this big earth. She’s a tiny thing and I’m kind of a giant, so her head fits just right in the nook of my neck. We’re big huggers. We hug all the time. But we’ve been hugging nonstop lately for body warmth (which is my favorite fan fiction trope, by the way), because our landlord was being a wanker and not turning on the heat. He finally did, and the cold propelled Stacy and I to both buy new winter coats, and she looks so adorable in hers I can hardly deal with it.
My next favorite hugger is my dog Margaret, who would rather sit in my lap and be hugged than anything else on the planet, including eating treats and riding in the car with her nose out the window. She’s a rocky road breed of dog, one of every single kind of the very best flavors, and one of the flavors is a snow dog, I guess, because she’s got more fur than a polar bear. So what happens is she always wants to hug, always wants to spoon (as the little spoon), always wants to be pressed right up against you — but she gets so hot! So she just pants and pants and pants. A lot of the time I have to force her to stop hugging so she won’t hyperventilate!
And my third favorite hugger is my grandma, who always smells like vanilla (but naturally, not even with lotion or anything!) and wraps me up and holds onto me for as long as I want. Even when I was at that teenage age where I felt weird about everything, including anyone touching me, I always loved to hug my grandma. She’s making steak for Thanksgiving today, she told me!
This is our cat, Quasar, and she looks like she wants a hug, right? Well, she does not and if you are dumb enough to stick your hand down there and touch her belly — even though it appears to be exactly what she wants — she would bite off at least one of your fingers. Probably one right now and one in your sleep, to be honest. Tricksy little hobbitses!
Do you need a hug this Thanksgiving? Tell us why, and how we can hug you with our internet arms. Who are the best huggers in your life? What makes a hug a good hug? Do your pets like to hug also? I am thankful for you today; it’s important to me for you to know that.
How To Post A Photo In The Comments:
1. Find a photo! This is the easy part. Find a photo on the web, right click (on a Mac, control+click), hit “Copy Image URL” and then…
2. Code it in to your comment! Use the following code, and use a DIRECT LINK to the image. Your image link should end in .JPG or .GIF or .PNG or .CallMeWhateverYouWant even. I don’t care, but it should be an image suffix!
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3. Go forth and jam.