It had been his first Thanksgiving – well okay last year’s Thanksgiving was officially his first Thanksgiving, but Arian tended not to count it on account of being a cat at the time. He’d been out on patrol when some sort of magic had turned him into a dark-eared, mostly bronze and white furred talking cat and had been stuck that way until two days after Thanksgiving.

For what seemed to him like pretty obvious reasons Arian had been unable to explain his sudden disappearance to his un-amused cousin, who had responded by grounding him for life, although she had later relented and rescinded his grounded status a few days before New Year’s Eve.

This year it seemed that Saffy was taking no chances and Arian had found himself practically bundled into her car when he got home from school on the last school day before the event itself.

Thanksgiving Arian found out was big , there seemed to be fair deal of people stuffed into his Uncle Phillip and Aunty Rachel’s place – all from the Atherton side of the family – which was probably unsurprising given that Aunty Rachel was a Laith by marriage and apart from Uncle Phillip and himself, the rest of the Laiths were back in the UK.

The house was a hive of activity by the time they arrived in the evening and Arian found that he practically had just about enough time to drop his bag off in the room that he’d been assigned to before being roped into helping out in the kitchen by washing and peeling potatoes for the mash. He was exhausted by the time that his role in helping out with the prep-work was over and at the point where he frankly didn’t want to see another potato in his life.

Somehow though, everything coalesced together despite the chaos, culminating in what could only be described as a feast. Arian was pretty sure that the sheer amount of food topped what had been put up for Christmas, although Saffy had laughed when he’d mentioned it and said that it was about the same.

Arian had ended up sat next to an elderly lady that he remembered from Christmas as having been introduced as a kind of Great Aunt, although to his dismay she still seemed convinced that he was a girl and had promised to sew him something for Christmas. As it had back at their initial meeting, his polite protestations to the contrary seemed to go over her head and the dark-haired teen had been relieved when the meal was over.

Apparently it was a family tradition to play board games after the meal, but the dinner had left him feeling so stuffed, that all Arian really wanted to do waddle off and find somewhere to curl up and sleep for the rest of the day. He’d ended up being roped into a game of Monopoly and had learnt that the chocolate-haired cousin, whose name he’d forgotten, was not someone who he ever wanted to play Monopoly with again, feeling quite relieved when he found himself bankrupt relatively early into the game and could bow out quietly.

All in all Arian’s first impression of his first official Thanksgiving had been that there was a lot of food – a lot, a lot of food. His second had been that it may have been even more chaotic than the Christmas. It had been nice in a kind of crazy way, being part of the whole family thing – even if he was dreading what his elderly Great Aunt would come up with for Christmas.

-- 600 words --