Email Elizabeththanksgiving in sacramento
A Thanksgiving Message About Reaching Out and Touching
Thanksgiving seems to be such an innocuous holiday, it doesn’t offend anybody for religious reasons or any other reason — except maybe those who study history — and it’s such a good time to reach out and spam somebody. At least that’s what the marketing guys, and especially those engaged in the Sacramento real estate business, seem to believe.
You know, if I haven’t heard from you all year long, maybe today is not the best day to send me Thanksgiving greetings. Don’t reach out and touch me with your spammy emails and hokey Thanksgiving cards, for I am not grateful for a nonexistent relationship with a person I do not know. I also don’t want to thank anybody on your behalf, so don’t give me a list of organizations and individuals I’m supposed to reach out and touch, simply because you demanded it.
I asked one such spammer a few days ago to take me off his database. I’ll never refer anybody to him and now that his name is so deeply ingrained, shoved into the irritation portion of my brain where I store names to stay clear of, I’ll make it a purpose to tell my clients to hire any other person except this guy. Clueless marketing like this can backfire. Because when I asked him to remove me, instead of apologizing and doing it, he tried to defend himself by saying it was just a holiday greeting.
It’s spam. Don’t reach and touch me. This is almost as bad as showing up on my doorstep and ringing my doorbell over and over, begging me to buy whatever worthless crap you are selling. These are the days I wished I lived in a two-story home so I could pour water on the creep down below.
Save your Thanksgiving greetings for those people you know and care about. Wish the checkout clerk at the grocery store a Happy Thanksgiving because the poor guy is working today and you are not. But don’t think of this holiday as an opportunity to market and promote yourself. Give it a rest.
No Turkey Pot Pie For You
My idea of a happy ending to 2013 is to sell every single one of my listings in Sacramento by Christmas and, because of that goal, I forgot to make reservations for Thanksgiving. These sneaky holidays, always slipping into the calendar when I’m focused elsewhere.
We seem to always do something different for Thanksgiving. No year is the same. Last year we flew to the Midwest to celebrate Thanksgiving, so there wasn’t much to think about apart from turning off my computer and getting on the plane, or vice versa. The year before my sister and niece came to visit us from Minneapolis. Somewhere in between we had Thanksgiving at the Hyatt downtown, which is sort of like dining at the airport. And some years, until our friends moved to Boston, we’d join them at The Firehouse in Old Sacramento.
One of the thoughts that popped up in my mind this year was my husband could make a turkey pot pie, the old fashioned way. Something different, yeah? Except, not buy an entire turkey, just the thighs and drumsticks because my first preference is dark meat. Which is why I don’t like going out for Thanksgiving dinner because most restaurants serve processed turkey breast. Yuck. Sadly, the thought of a turkey pot pie did not excite the person I had expected to produce it.
Only because I didn’t create a Power Point presentation. If I had put together a slide show, starting with the cats bowing down on the floor in an obedient manner: you the man, you the man; followed by Thomas Dolby strolling through the kitchen playing a baby keyboard; then a slide showcasing a huge sunshine smile on my husband’s face as he’s rolling out dough, receiving a shoulder massage from his adoring lingerie-clad wife as he’s shelling peas; perhaps another sharing playful bites of turkey in a toothy tug-of-war like the dog we don’t have might do — he might have been induced to make a turkey pot pie.
But, as it is, no turkey pot pie. And I watched Thomas Dolby play 1980s music at the Crest, too. You’d think there would be a tradeoff.
Photo: Thomas Dolby at the Crest Theatre by Elizabeth Weintraub
