It’s hard to believe that Thanksgiving is literally in just a few days. It seems like only yesterday that summer was lighting a literal fire under so many folks’ asses. But here we are. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday: You get good food and fellowship with family and friends.
And speaking of good food, it’s called dressing. You know what foodstuff I’m talking about: the item served in a pan with various breadstuffs and seasonings and vegetables and whatnots and henceforths that some of you poor, unfortunate souls call stuffing.
Can I rap with y’all a taste? That’s a pun—I really had no idea that the stuffing-versus-dressing argument was both such a big one and so sustainable. Right here on VSB, we had this discussion more than once back in 2014 (both here and here). It was enlightening to see how fun and wrong so many people are (again, it’s dressing).
I decided to Google stuffing versus dressing, since I believe both that the children are our future and that people should know what it is they’re even arguing over. This led me to the website of Butterball, a company that, as you can imagine, is often extremely busy during this time of year. It only makes sense that they’d weigh in on this dilemma, which, turns out, is a nationwide one.
(It also turns out that Butterball is wrong, too.)
According to Butterball and several informal polls I’ve taken, it would seem that the vast majority of people refer to that bready goodness as stuffing. What’s confusing about my own life is that the vast majority (like 70 percent plus) of my American family comes from the states of Alabama and Georgia. Alabama? We call it dressing. In Georgia, we apparently largely call it stuffing. Which has me all confused because I know in my soul it’s dressing even though the two states where my family hails from seem to be at Hatfields-and-McCoys odds.
So I texted my sisters—three siblings I grew up in a house with who also have the same Alabama-and-Georgia connections. We all call it dressing. Which means my mother and grandmother would have called it dressing, which means it’s dressing because ain’t nobody gonna tell me that my mama or grandma is wrong.
I even assumed that perhaps the South largely called it dressing, but according to Butterball, even the South as a whole is in a civil war over what to call it. Now, I have a difficult time defending the state of Alabama in any capacity at the moment, but I’m on the side of dressing, which Alabama sides with, which means that even a broke clock is right twice a day. You have no idea how hard it was to type that last sentence.
To me, the answer to the eons-old question is simple: Stuffing is in the bird, dressing ain’t. For some reason, this simple truth—this quest for truth, light and the way—leads some people astray. Lead us not into temptation for we already know the way, but lead us to the kitchen and the side of right as dressing.
It’s time to come out of the dark ages and acknowledge the foodstuff for its true and proper name, dressing. Stuffing goes in couch pillows and Build-a-Bears. Dressing goes in my belly for Thanksgiving, not to be confused with dressing that you put on salad—they’re pronounced differently. One is pronounced like DRE-ssing (Thanksgiving), and the other is pronounced DRES-sing (salad). It’s a subtle difference, I know.
But join me on the side of right; enlighten the unenlightened. Give somebody who doesn’t know what they don’t know a solid dressing down. Then pass them a pan of dressing so that we may all sit down at both the right and left hands of God the Father almighty and get our eat on. Praise the Lord and pass the peas, as they used to say—to the left because all I need in this life of sin ... is dressing.
It is entirely possible that you will still hold on to your wayward ways in this vocabulistic war over Thanksgiving food. Continue—call it stuffing—but just know that you are wrong and that somewhere out there is a child who might look to you for guidance one day. Steer them right. Guide lil’ Dejuantré to the dressing. Like sex, do it for the kids.
Happy (early) Thanksgiving. May your dressing be plentiful.
Thanks, Obama.