Now that some stores are starting to open on Thanksgiving Day, my BFF Stacy and I don’t have to waste time listening to my boring Uncle Bob go on and on about his quadruple bypass or hear about her Aunt Sally’s double knee replacement. After about 15 minutes of listening to Uncle Bob, you’ll know what it feels like to have a near-death experience, too. We girls can hardly wait to get out of the house and go shopping.

That makes it sound like I’m not very close to my family, but I am. I text them all the time, and I am Facebook friends with a lot of them. If that isn’t close, I don’t know what is. But at last year’s dinner, they made me turn off my phone. It was like spending an hour and a half in solitary confinement. I’ll never do that again. I mean, like, where’s the love?

Stacy’s mom made her turn off her phone, too. She said, “You girls can talk after dinner.” As soon as Stacy got back to the real world, she texted me that “if I ever want to have an old-timey meal with a bunch of old people I don’t care about, I’ll just go to a Cracker Barrel.”