Well, I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Margaret and I went over to her parents’ house and joined a motley crew of family members, friends and assorted hangers-on in a calorie-jammed celebration of colonialism and genocide. I trust yours went about the same. 😉

We had a larger-than-normal share of weird foodstuffs this year, primarily because my brother-in-law Matt and his wife Shannon have gone vegetarian since—though not necessarily because of—our last Thanksgiving feast. Along with some wonderful twice-baked potatoes, they brought some Tofurkey “Giblet” Gravy, which looked like plain old giblet gravy, and a Quorn Turkey-Style Holiday Roast, which looked like the world’s largest Compazine Suppository. I took this opportunity to opine that their Slab-O-Fungus Loaf should have come with a family pack of ampules of L-tryptophan, to complete the Thanksgiving simulation.

But the gold-medal winner in the weird foods category that night, also provided by Matt and Shannon, was the two-liter bottle of Pepsi Holiday Spice, which, though it sounds like it ought to be the newest addition to the Spice Girls (and really, didn’t they do everything but name one of their members after a popular soft drink?), is in fact a “Limited Edition” beverage marketed by Pespi for the 2004 Thanksgiving/Christmas season.

Perhaps “weird” is too strong a term for it. Let’s say “peculiar”. That’s certainly what we were saying around the dinner table. In fact, by evening’s end we were referrring to the product as Pepsi Peculiar, as in, “Could you pour me a little more of that Pepsi Peculiar?” Not that there were a lot of takers after the first round. Here’s a breakdown of some of the more colorful comments:

Vin: “Tastes like furniture polish smells.”

Andrew: “Tastes like Pepsi that someone poured into an old cup of tea.”

Margaret: “Doesn’t taste strange enough to be weird.”

Renee: “Tastes like Robitussin, but without the alcohol.”

Upon further reflection, Renee changed her review to say it tasted like a “graveyard”, a term I had not heard before but understood quite well upon further elaboration: taking a cup at a soda fountain and filling it with a little bit from every soda dispenser, producing a bizarre beverage hybrid that Nature never intended. We all agreed that she was on to something; there was definitely a sort-of-cola-sort-of-root-beer-sort-of-Dr-Pepper flavor to the stuff.

What we could definitely all agree on was that the product was in no way an improvement over regular Pepsi, which in and of itself is not much of an improvement over a tall, frosty glass of neat’s foot oil. We agreed to set the beverage aside for further experimentation in combination with alcohol at the upcoming New Year’s Ever celebration. More on this story as it develops.