who hates pie?

I've got this brother. He's getting rather tall, sort of loady -- you may have heard of him, or read his rarely-posted blog here. This isn't a picture of my brother, but rather some gay-rights acitivist from Canada who happens to share his name.

He's a good guy, my brother, working hard to earn an honest wage, living the dream, and all that, but I've got a major beef with him around Thanksgiving: he doesn't like pie. Who hates pie? He says he's more of a "cake guy", which makes sense, and fits with what we've known about him all along, but it's still bothersome.

My family's typical thanksgiving consists of sitting down in our dining room with some obscure and elderly friend of my parents' for a long meal. We-the-brothers make subtle snide comments and try to keep the jokes under Dad's radar, and I, being the more well mannered and eldest sibling, ask said obscure elder about life on the farm, or whatever, intermittently to try and show some male interest in between my mother and sister's more prolonged conversation. We eat as much turkey as possible, and then stumble off to sleep off the tryptophan while someone (I never know who, so that probably means Mom) does the dishes. After this extended annual ritual, a piece of cake just wouldn't do.

No way. It's pie time, baby. Pie.

I'm a pumpkin guy, myself. It's not my favorite kind of pie, but it fits the season, and makes it feel like thanksgiving. I won't hold it against you if you'd rather eat apple or cherry, or even one of those more abstract flavors like peach pecan or straw-rhubarb berry cream. It's pie, any way you slice it, on a day made for pie, and that's all that matters.

I stole this picture from someone else's website.
Yet, it's still pie.