Thanksgiving: A holiday originally designated to give thanks for the harvest of the previous year, the harvest that gave the colonials and Native Americans corn, and wheat, and vegetables, and fruit, and poultry. And pies. Ahh, pies. We love them even though we always burn the crust and make the filling too loose that once you cut the crust, all of the filling spills out onto your great-uncle’s plate, as well as onto his fancy white shirt. Nonetheless, pies are great. There are so many options that you can fill them with: apple, banana cream, blackberry, blueberry, boysenberry, bumbleberry, butter, cherry, gooseberry, key lime, lemon meringue, meat, mud, peach, pear, pecan, pumpkin, raspberry, rhubarb, saskatoon berry, strawberry, strawberry rhubarb, and sweet potato. You can really put anything into a pie, I mean gooseberries? Really? Nobody just eats gooseberries for fun, yet gooseberry pies are a thing that people apparently enjoy. Here are some examples of the pies that you cannot go wrong with anytime of year. Unless,of course, you burn the crust.

Although I would pass on the gooseberry pie, I would certainly accept an offering of a nice, creamy, delicious, lemon meringue pie. If there was a heaven, lemon meringue pie would have been sent down from it. The nice light meringue coating the gooey lemon custard surpasses any other pie ever made. Have it with some fresh fruit and your Thanksgiving just got a whole lot better. There is a certain technique for eating lemon meringue pie that everyone has to know to survive Thanksgiving. Never ever, ever, ever pick it apart layer by layer. Don’t just eat the meringue, the custard, or crust. Make sure that you have a bit of all the textures on your fork before you bring it to your mouth. The glory of lemon meringue pie is in its layered textures. These textures please the mouth more than any other food will ever hope to do.

Even if  you can never have too much lemon, we all need a little chocolate once in a while. That is where mud pie comes into play. No, mud pie is not literal mud in pie form. Mud pie is, in fact, what you could call “chocolate paradise”. To make a true mud pie, your crust has to be made of crushed chocolate cookie held together by that handy ingredient: butter. If you’re thinking, “wow this sounds like its going to pack a few pounds onto me,” you’re right. The filling is the hearty concoction of chocolate, heavy cream, sugar, and, you guessed it, more butter. You can make a mud pie more like a dense cake or more like a chocolate pudding. Always eat it with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream to counter thedeadly amount ofchocolate. But come on, the best way to die would certainly be death by chocolate.

Now we come to the pie that probably is responsible for more deaths than certain wars are: Butter pie. *cue dramatic music* There are certain safety precautions you should take before eating a slice of this pie. 1-make sure that you cut your slice no more than 1 inch across. 2-always have a scoop of vanilla ice cream near by. And 3-if you are particularly sensitive to rich substances, try not to wolf down your pie. Make it last and let your stomach do its work slowly, but surely. The basic ingredients are butter and sugar (both white and brown). Of course there are other minimal ingredients like salt and vanilla extract, but you won’t taste those in the final outcome. Butter pies should be made with a thin, crumbly crust (for this you need lots of butter, of course), and can be topped with nuts or dried fruit. Personally, I enjoy getting my butter buzz without the intrusion of insignificant toppings such as…walnuts (uncontrollable hacking, coughing, and gagging).

You may be asking why old favorites like apple pie and pumpkin pie weren’t suggested. Here’s the simple answer: they are frauds. Sorry, you extremely patriotic Uncle Sams out there, but apple pie was only invented to give people a reason to love their country. And what do people do when they love their country? They go out and fight for their country. That’s right, pumpkin and apple pies are no more than poorly veiled recruiting mechanisms. But also, they’re just…boring. Get out of the regular swing of the holidays and go for a pie that seems a bit out of reach. Don’t waste a second! Get out to the supermarket and buy all the butter you can. But don’t forget the vanilla ice cream.