There are two conflicting versions of Thanksgiving, I believe.

The first is our idyllic, yet largely fictional, hope for the holiday, with romanticized visions of our favorite F's: family, friends, food, fun and football. It's a cornucopia of delusional goodness that lingers throughout the year until the fourth Thursday of November.

The second version is our fearful, yet factual reality, after the holiday finally arrives. Too much family, too few friends, the wrong food, passive-aggressive fun and non-competitive football. All it takes is one or two of these miscues to spoil our idyllic version.

This year, the running joke with many families is that the presidential election and its outcome eventually will poison even the best planned festivities. All it may take is one supporter of President-elect Donald Trump to even hint about making America great again to one supporter of Hillary Clinton. And, kaboom.

The visual would be similar to dropping a frozen turkey into a deep fryer. I'll leave it up to you to determine which person, Trump or Clinton, is the turkey versus the deep fryer.

To help avoid this from happening at your Thanksgiving dinner, I've created a handy list of forbidden words and phrases that shouldn't be uttered by any guest. Feel free to cut out this column and post it on your fridge or your front door.

My list includes Trump (even if you're playing pinochle), Hillary (even if you're a Swank fan), Pence, Election Day, Make America Great Again and alt-right (though “all right” is all right).

Other forbidden words and phrases include “nasty woman,” “WikiLeaks,” “emails,” “crooked” and “drain the swamp,” unless you actually live near a swamp that needs to be drained. To be safe, I should include “locker room talk.”

Also feel free to add more words and terms to your customized list, depending on your family, friends and invited guests. For every violation of the forbidden word list, I suggest each guest gets scored for his or her verbal miscue or missile. The first guest (or host) who reaches, say, five or 10 violations must either wash the dishes, play with the kids or listen to Aunt Joan's rants, again.

Looking back, I wonder if the first Thanksgivings involved similar verbal land mines.

“In the fall of 1621, the pilgrims — the early settlers of Plymouth Colony — held a three-day feast to celebrate a bountiful harvest,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Despite my skepticism about this event actually taking place, many historians regard it as our nation's first Thanksgiving. The Wampanoag Indians, historians say, not only were in attendance during this first feast but they played a key role in its success.

That tribe essential was to the very survival of the early colonists during the newcomers' first year, history tells us. Without the Wampanoag tribe, those pilgrims likely would have perished.

Since that inaugural feast of thankfulness nearly 400 years ago, the number of Americans with English ancestry has swelled to 24 million, according to federal data. Conversely, the number of members of the “Wampanoag American Indian tribal grouping,” as it's now called, has been slashed to 6,500.

That's right. They're near extinction.

Was it something they said at those first versions of Thanksgiving? No, of course not. But their tragic outcome can serve as a lesson for all of us during this year's Thanksgiving. Good intentions mean nothing in the wrong company.

During these rocky times, keep this in mind with Thursday's guest list for your holiday dinner.

Historians have recorded ceremonies of thanks among other groups of European settlers in North America, including the British colonists in Virginia as early as 1619.

This legacy of collective thankfulness — and the accompanying feast — since have survived, as have many other cultural rituals in American society. Some of them seem silly today, based on Pagan rituals from centuries ago that evolved into a twisted form of their original version.

Others, like Thanksgiving, have retained their original recipe: sharing food while sharing appreciation for that food and the bounty of other gifts in our life. For this reason, I view Thanksgiving as the simplest, and purest, holiday of the year.

The event rightly became a national holiday 153 years ago (Oct. 3, 1863) when President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of November as a national day of thanksgiving.

Later, President Franklin Roosevelt clarified that Thanksgiving Day always should be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of the month to encourage earlier holiday shopping, never on the occasional fifth Thursday, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

All of us — regardless of politics, race or sexual orientation, among other things — should be thankful and grateful to live in a country where we can have such reheated, leftover debates from Election Day or previous Thanksgivings.

I'm well aware that computers, the internet and social media are second nature to millions of people in the year of our lord 2016.

I'm also well aware there are others who don't use computers and won't access the internet for whatever reason. Locally, many Post-Tribune readers fall into this category.

Today I'd like to publicly thank all those longtime readers of print newspapers.

The newspaper industry may not show it enough while always flirting with our digital audience, but we appreciate your daily loyalty to this newsprint dinosaur each day. Thanks for reading what we have to say, and for not minding ink on your hands.

jdavich@post-trib.com

Twitter@ jdavich