There’s been a mushroom cloud above the nuclear family for years now.

Mom’s been married three times. Dad’s name doesn’t match the one on your birth certificate. There are not family trees any longer. There is family fescue.

Think about it. When’s the last time you ate Sunday dinner with everybody at the table?

Billy cutting into a piece of roast beef. Suzy cheerfully telling everybody about her day. Mom accepting everyone’s gratitude for a job well done and dad recounting the afternoon’s NFL game.

All right, I have not been smoking something funny in Ward Cleaver’s Grabow pipe.

It just does not happen.

About the only time our extended family all sits down together is on Thanksgiving.

We meet at Mom’s house. That’s the tradition. Everyone brings a dish or two. The appetizers are already out. The cheese ball encrusted in walnuts. The spinach dip nestled into the center of a bowl fashioned from rye bread. Shrimp positioned just so on a glass platter and an assortment of sliced cheese, sausage and crackers.

And that is before the kickoff of the real traditional meal. How do you spell g-l-u-t-t-o-n-y?

So we eat. And we eat again. And we lounge. We watch television. We put in a movie. We play with kids and grandkids and it’s a great time.

And a number of stores have announced plans to start their "Black Friday" sales on Thanksgiving night, some as early as 8 p.m.

An online petition, started by a Target employee to protest the chain's midnight Thanksgiving opening, had almost 160,000 signatures by Thursday afternoon. The petition was started by Anthony Hardwick.

"A midnight opening robs the hourly and in-store salary workers of time off with their families on Thanksgiving Day," Hardwick, of Omaha, Neb., wrote when he created the petition, noting that workers need to be in the store at least an hour before doors open. "A full holiday with family is not just for the elite of this nation -- all Americans should be able to break bread with loved ones and get a good night's rest on Thanksgiving!"

Amen, Anthony Hardwick. Oops, gotta go. It’s time to make a turkey sandwich complete with stuffing and cranberry sauce. I have not eaten in 38 minutes.