Some harvest hijinks to liven up your Thanksgiving spirits

We're getting closer to Thanksgiving and I really feel the need to rev up my holiday spirit. To me, having Thanksgiving spirit is just as important as Christmas spirit,perhaps more so these days.

With all of the rushing to Black Thursday/Friday/Cyber Monday and beyond, this day of simply rejoicing with your loved ones is being severely overlooked and under appreciated.

Nothing against gift giving but let's slow down and smell the turkey and stuffing there.folks. With that sentiment in mind, here are a few humorous highlights from pop culture that offer a smile with your pumpkin pie:

TOFURKEY FOR ME, TOFURKEY FOR YOU: Nothing says go-to laugh on Thanksgiving better than the tofu version of the preferred protein of the day. One of the first places I recall seeing it featured was the Season Three Gilmore Girls ' episode entitled "A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving."

The vegan food choices of Mrs. Kim were a well established trope by this time and her holiday celebrations were suitably somber as well. Lorelai's attempt to convince Mrs. Kim to accept a chocolate turkey was a bit more successful than her plan to fake eating the tofurkey, which didn't slow her holiday feasting roll,of course:

Tofurkey plays a big part of a very memorable holiday episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, as Marie and Debra come to an unusual accord for the dinner plans .

With Marie being the major chef in the family, one of the biggest battlegrounds had been Thanksgiving but this time around, she wanted to start eating healthier and her daughter-in-law was her only supporter of a different menu.

By the end, the Barone clan wound up having a traditional late night Thanksgiving meal but it was nice that for once, Debra and Marie got along. That was short lived,granted, yet still sweet and much more savory than that pale imitation of a bird:

HAPPY THANKSGIVING BACK: The hectic nature of Thanksgiving grocery shopping is nicely captured in this bit from You've Got Mail, as Kathleen Kelly gets in the wrong check out lane with no sympathy from her fellow shoppers or the cashier.

Having been behind the register during a busy sales event myself, I am on the side of Rose(played by Sara Ramirez, who went on to Gray's Anatomy) and yes, Kathleen should have gone to another line. Then again, Joe Fox's charms are reason enough to give in on a thing like this:

AFTER DINNER CONFESSION MINTS: Family fights are an expected part of Thanksgiving and even Friends had their own version of that, with Ross and Monica competing to see who could expose the worst to their parents.

That inspired everyone else in the room to blurt out their own hidden feelings, including Rachel's astonishment that she wasn't supposed to put beef in the English trifle that all of them forced down during dessert.

The only winner out of this whole mess was Chandler, who got the Gellers to stop giving him the cold shoulder and accept him as part of the family(whether that was a good thing or not was yet to be seen there):

Let's wrap up these leftovers with the now infamous Addams Family Values scene where Wednesday takes over the hideous Thanksgiving pageant at  summer camp.

 This sequence has become as iconic as A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving(and much more historically accurate,in my opinion, than that Peanuts pilgrim special they drag out each year). While I do wish that mainstream media would embrace this holiday with more warmth these days, seeing this amusing attack on such a worn out holiday convention turn into a mini-classic does give me hope for the future,as well as the funny: