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This Thanksgiving condiment is an affront to god.
With less than a week to go until Thanksgiving, you probably started thinking about all of the traditional things that the holiday brings — the aggressively mediocre meal, Cousin Colin vs. Uncle Jack's political debates, a nice bottle of Beaujolais, losing an expensive three-team NFL parlay, sitting in traffic with a belly full of mashed potatoes, reflecting on all of your good fortune, blah, blah, blah.
But then you remember something so horrific that it immediately turns your holiday reverie into a culinary apocalypse. It's the nefarious blob of crimson repugnance known as cranberry sauce. This so-called "sauce" is nothing more than a cloying, jiggly abomination that mocks the very essence of flavor. You can't quite put your finger on exactly why you hate it so much, because there are simply too many reasons to count.
But you try anyway.
First of all, it's the texture. Cranberry sauce, with its gelatinous, semi-solid state is like your first-grade science experiment gone horribly wrong. Only this time, Mrs. Bernstein isn't the only one who ends up needing to change her pants. It's like someone hocked a legendary loogie and thought, "Hey, let's make this edible," and then just gave up halfway through.
You'll never forget the Thanksgiving Debacle of 1997 when Cousin Colin, then just a burgeoning progressive, threw a handful of the amorphous goop at Uncle Jack for loudly suggesting that Operation Desert Fox was a justified military operation and not a transparent effort by the United States to destabilize the Iraqi government. Colin had incredible political acumen (and a powerful throwing arm) for a 7-year-old, and the way that cranberry sauce undulated as it connected with Uncle Jack's shiny bald head has never left you.
Then you remember how it tastes, and your gag reflex starts kicking like a caffeinated pre-schooler in a bounce house. Cranberry sauce barrages the tongue with a spastic fit of sugar-coated cacophony. It's as if you fed two tons of candy corn to a middle-aged organic farmer, then melted down his shit into a tart, gooey mess. Imagine the overwhelming astringency of an unwashed dog masquerading as a "sophisticated" side dish. It's akin to expecting a fine wine and getting a warm RC Cola instead. The sauce's unique funk clings to your taste buds for hours, lingering longer than that guy Lawrence from work who always wants to tell you what NFTs to buy. You'd rather listen to your four-year-old daughter play an out-of-tune trumpet than take advice from that guy.
God, you hate cranberry sauce.
And wait, there's more! The color. Oh, the color. It's not natural. It's the same shade as the lipstick Aunt Honey wore in the '80s which was a fashion crime in and of itself. It sticks out on the Thanksgiving table like a sore thumb, or like that one time you unwisely rocked a Kerry Edwards 2004 t-shirt to the Lone Star Livestock Show. The bruises you came home with were a sickening shade of maroon, suspiciously similar to the cranberry hue that haunts your holiday dreams.
In conclusion, cranberry sauce is an affront to god, an insult to taste buds everywhere, and a blight upon the landscape of a great American tradition. It's the Jar Jar Binks of holiday foods — unnecessary, annoying, and universally disliked. So this Thanksgiving, do yourself a favor: skip the cranberry sauce, savor the sweet taste of culinary freedom, and, whatever you do, don't ask Uncle Jack about the debt ceiling.