If a small child seems upset on Thanksgiving, there’s three likely reasons:

One, they accidentally tried a forkful of rutabaga casserole. Two, they caught a glimpse of Jerry Jones in the Cowboys owner’s suite. And three, all their classmates make fun of the way they dress and how they talk because their family fled to America from Russia to escape religious persecution.

Molly is in the latter camp, though we can’t rule out the possibility that Jerry Jones is haunting her nightmares like some sort of Football Facelift Freddy Krueger. Even though she’s a brilliant gymnast and smart as a whip, she’s still an outcast because she doesn’t know about basic American traditions like “Thanksgiving,” “Black Friday,” and “Starting to water down dad’s drinks before he tries to take his shirt off and fight his brother in the driveway like he did last year.” Never mind that Turduckens are essentially edible Matryoshka dolls; these second graders know what they like, and it ain’t Comrade Molly!

This classroom cold war reaches its zenith when the teacher tells everyone to do an art project about Pilgrims. Molly gets the crazy idea that perhaps Americans’ understanding of this holiday is facile, and that maybe by pointing out the timeless, universal themes of the true Thanksgiving story, it might serve as an opportunity to build understanding with her classmates.

Nope! The resulting fallout from this act of initiative will haunt her for the rest of her life and torpedo any chance of future academic success, serving as a warning to all other students that any nail who sticks out will be pounded down with prejudice. Happy Thanksgiving!

Written by: Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, Conor Lastowka, & Sean Thomason