David Erik Nelson's Blog

I repost this (or a variant of it) every year. This is a year, and so I repost. QED. After all, without our traditions, we are as shakey as a fiddler on the roof.

1. “What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

I wrote this essay a few years back, as a little bonus for the folks kind enough to have subscribed to my newsletter.  A good friend, Chris Salzman, was gracious enough to make something pretty of it. I relish the opportunity to reshare it each year, and I’m doing so once again.  Every word here is both true and factual—which is a harder trick than you’d think.

You’ll be 15 minutes into that Lesser Family Feast in Michigan when your mother-in-law will turn to you and ask:

“What do Jews do on Thanksgiving?”

You should be prepared for this sort of thing in Michigan. But even though I’m warning you in advance, you still won’t be prepared.…

(read more: IN MICHIGAN: A PRIMER, A TRAVELOGUE)

2. “As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!”

THANKSGIVING TURKEY GIVEAWAY! (WKRP in Cincinnati) from Tony DeSanto on Vimeo.

I repost this every year mostly because I love this gag, and because watching this on TV—and rehashing it with my mom and sisters each year—is one of my fondest holiday memories. But I also come back to it again and again because it is a damned near perfect piece of writing. (If you wanna read more of my thoughts on this specific gag and what it can teach writers, you can do so here.)

3. “…your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs; we will sell our bracelets by the road sides…”

I share this because the song cracks me up and I sorta love Wednesday’s “Pocahontas” speech, but also because there is a way that the writers put “majority unpleasantness” on display here that I really miss. The depiction of “Running Bear” is cruel, but also empowering. I felt seen, as a chubby insecure Jewish kid watching this scene.

4. ♬♫♪ “Caught his eye on turkey day / As we both ate Pumpkin Pie … ” ♬♫♪

Man, I remember when this song was big when I was little; you couldn’t turn on AM radio without hearing those synths from Halloween onward. Man, the memories! ♬♫♪

5. The Alice’s Restaurant Massacre (in four part harmony)

I’m a child of the 1980s, so most of my nostalgic holiday memories are TV- or radio-related.

I hope your T-day is good and sweet.  Gobblegobble!

Last week was “parts of faces” week in my journal. I was fairly pleased with all of them, but this schnozzola stood out:

Noses are hard. Mostly that’s because of a lack of hard lines (see my late 2024 complaint that “there is no such thing as a ‘nose’“). But even in profile—the one position where the nose does have a hard definitive outline—it’s still really hard. It’s a damned odd shape, unique to each individual. It grabs an inordinate amount of our visual attention, and we’re extremely sensitive to the intricacies of that shape. It’s like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina never said: “All eyes are alike; each nose is unhappy in its own way.”

Anyway, I think this is the first nose I’ve ever gotten right.

I can never decide if these little guys are extremely sad, or sort of inspiring. They’re stunted and twisted by their constraints, but also tenacious despite insurmountable concrete limitations.

If you’re looking at this, you’re almost by definition just a twisty little city tree like me. And, now that I think about it, probably that tree—which I’ve regularly walked past for maybe 30 years now—doesn’t have too high an opinion of me: I could literally go anywhere in the world, and haven’t gotten any farther than he has.

What a fucking judgy-ass tree, amirght? Fuck him.

This is my second attempt at sketching in charcoal. Instead of using a charcoal pencil (as I did in my first stab, which I wasn’t happy with), I used some old willow charcoal my wife had kicking around. This stuff is literally just charred sticks. It’s not nearly as dark as charcoal pencils, tending to more gray than black. But it is so soft that you can practically erase a line just by rubbing it out with your fingertips. It’s a blunt tool, but incredibly forgiving. As you build up layers of it working toward black, it basically grinds down to powdery ash. Drawing with it is half drawing and half finger-painting. Very fun and liberating, if you can release yourself from needing to control how things go.

Week 44 was another “Chiaroscuro Faces Week.”

My son characterized several sketches from this week as looking like “ghosts unwillingly dissolving.”

With that second sketch he noted that “the background shadows and the face shadows really look cut from the same cloth. That’s really hard to do but I think you did it there.”

I see what he’s saying, but in this case it was totally unintentional. It was only about a week later that I was clicking through various screenshots of old drawing instructional books I found on Pinterest, and saw a discussion of the problem of hard lines in primarily tonal studies. In both cases it was the use/absence of hard lines that got the effect that made them striking (on the upper sketch the left edge of the face has a hard delineation while the right is allowed to “dissolve”; on the lower the face is framed entirely in shadow, with no precise hard outline).

I wouldn’t have put all that together without his feedback. For my part, I just liked the emotions that wound up on the page.

The real lesson of the Great Cracker Barrel Logo Debacle of 2025: Stop and think, dammit.

In August a struggling restaurant chain whose customer base is mostly over 65 made a mild logo change. (That change wasn’t even really a change: the “new logo” closely matched the alternate version of the logo Cracker Barrel had been using on menus and digital ads for six years.)

This “change” triggered a social media firestorm, which ignited a minor culture war brushfire. A week later ~40% of that company’s market value had gone up in smoke, and already weak foot traffic dropped another 8% (per WSJ). That’s $545 million gone, and no doubt more than a few jobs with it.

Within 60 days the chain pulled a complete 180, trashing 18 months of work on everything from visual identity to food-prep procedures.

Then it turns out that the social media firestorm was mostly fabricated. Around half of all the griping was automated bots (via NRN and Restaurant Business). Much of the “real” complaining from humans was in response to the fabricated controversy.

Now the whole story comes out, and I’ve seen a string of mediocre “thought leadership” posts on LinkedIn using this as an object lesson. Those pieces of “thought leadership” invariably have turned out to be entirely AI written. ( writing is pretty easy to spot, but I still use Pangram to check my work.)

Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel still serves mediocre food slowly to a dwindling audience under the auspices of a logo and decor that haven’t changed since the Carter administration. At every stage in this farce, people are reacting to and amplifying artificial signals rather than honestly listening and talking to each other—and causing real harm in the mix—and never stopping to ask if they actually care, if any of this matters, if what they are doing is tending toward making things better, if they even have a goal or preferred end-state in mind…oy.

Week 43 was “Chiaroscuro Faces Week.” Deep shadows are fun, because the visual and emotional impact is often inversely proportional to the effort. This is definitely a realm where knowing when to take the drawing away from yourself pays off.

My son thought this was the sketch of the week: “I like the way middle right seems to lean in a little. Makes it look the spookiest.”

I sorta preferred this one from earlier in the week:

This sketch was the hardest—in that I erased everything and started over several times—and the easiest, once I stopped listening to a brain that was telling me “this is an eye! this is a nose! those are lips, you idiot!” and just put black where I saw black. I sorta love how the lighting make so clear that there’s a skull under that skin and meat. If anything, my failure here is that I didn’t go for blacker blacks.

If you can turn off your brain and just let your eye tell your hand where the black goes, hardshadowed, dramatic chiaroscuro actually almost makes for the easiest sketches.

I’ve spoken at length about the Satanic Panic in the past, especially Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse—which was a real book that was earnestly written and actually published in order to (traumatically) teach children and parents how to recognize the signs of something that was believed to be an epidemic when I was a kid, but in fact never ever ever happened to anyone (more details, with links to sources, at my original post).

Sadly, I’d never come across a print copy of the complete book. Happily, that no longer matters because the good folks at Archive.org have digitized it and you can now read the whole thing online for free:

Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse on Archive.org

(As an added bonus, Archive.org also has this law enforcement training video on Satanic Cults from 1994! Again: real resources for taking real actions in the real world to address a made-up thing, often with disastrous consequences for people who did nothing wrong.)

The full text of Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy is worth a look. Seeing the whole book really does underscore that this was a well-intentioned project (and even decently trauma informed, for the period). But those good intentions were tragically misdirected, literally paving a road to hell for some folks who were accused of imagined atrocities.

I suppose there is a lesson there, America. I don’t imagine we’ll learn it.

Caption: “Way past his bedtime, a Little Boy stumbles upon a disturbing video on the internet.”

Somehow so much worse than you assume, without being remotely gory or violent or sexual.

No Sketch of the Week last week, because it was full week of failed attempts at capturing a specific promotional head shot of Boris Karloff. There’s nothing especially hard about sketching Boris Karloff, just that he has a human head and face, and I struggle at those in general. Probably a great place to start would be actually looking at folks’ faces when I spoke to them

This week was Glitch Week, and I sorta liked how these two came out (yeah, the first one is another failed attempt at Boris Karloff. This time he came out looking like Jimmy Stewart! Last week, he was mostly the unwholesome splice of Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and HP Lovecraft as himself).

I don’t know that these are good sketches, but I enjoyed working on them. Carefully reproducing a destructive analog video error in a pencil sketch sorta started as a joke, but quickly blossomed into a really good deep exercise in remembering and seeing what you see in your (fallible) memories.

The top one, of Glitch Karloff, gave me the oddest shudder working on it. Drawing it was upsetting but also fascinating in a way I can’t put my finger on.