There’s a neat scene in Twain’s gloriously neat “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” where the Boss takes the King out of his royal world and they travel incognito, disguised as peasants, to teach the King what the world is actually like. The King, like nearly all monarchs, is something of a simpleton.

At one point in their adventures, they are in a tavern or something with a bunch of poor farmers deeply suspicious of strangers and the King gets it into his murky noggin to amiably talk farming with them. Of course he knows nothing whatever about farming. In his addled way and to the mounting anxiety of the Boss and alarm of the farmers, the King declaims on onions growing on trees and that plums are cereals “always dug in the unripe state” which are improved when “one doth assuage the asperities of their nature by admixture of the tranquilizing juice of the wayward cabbage –” and how goats shed their fur and the like until the crowd explodes at his madness and a huge fight follows.

So it is that women invented holiday football.

I risk imprisonment for the observation, but women are not much like men. Obvious? Especially so when it comes to cooking for the holidays. It is my long experience that women who command huge enterprises or tend to the daisies outside, those who teach or those who work in a shop or fly large aircraft change dramatically when it comes time to cook for Thanksgiving, Christmas or other important holidays. They set out to do the ten thousand things required with a plan and purpose that humbles the whirling of the major computers frivolously generating the force for the rest of our lives. In the kitchen and at the holidays they are not to messed with.

Find two women in a holiday kitchen and it is to know the easy joy of clams. Three or four together a-cooking create satisfactions and results worthy of the great artists. Put one man into the mix and it all goes kablooey.

The standard issue male, like nearly all of the breed, is something of a simpleton. He gets underfoot. He tinkers. He seeks to help. He undergoes culinary brainstorms.

The man will open the oven door 589 times for no reason whatever, looking in at the turkey which would by then be better cooked in the kitchen than in the oven for all the heat escaping. The male will imagine that there is wisdom in his deep thinking that if the idea is to cook something for two hours at 300 degrees you can save time by cooking it for an hour at 600 degrees. He stirs things that require no stirring, and are often harmed by his efforts. If the woman sets a spoon aside to do something, he will move the spoon, wash it, put it away leaving the woman to grab empty air when she reaches out for that spoon, a huge boiling pot in her other hand. The man will make unending suggestions as to how the mashed potatoes can be improved by a pound of walnuts because, he recounts in excruciating detail, he thinks he saw something like that when he was remoting his way past the Food Channel once. Maybe it was coconuts. The male will idly change the pages in the poised recipe book so that the woman will not find at all the directions about seasoning or temperature precisely when she needs to know and that was Exactly Why She Left The Book Open To That Page In The First Place You Dope! He will carry on empty-drum conversations when the cook needs quiet to collect her thouights. He will invariably be standing in exactly the spot where the woman needs to be doing something rather more critical than his dutifully reading the ingredients on each and every bottle of spices and condiments.  He will spill things. He will add things to sauces and plates that have no place there whatever. He will jabber about onions growing on trees, goats shedding and …

…And so women used their vast influence to have football played on holiday television. Anything to get rid of us meddlesome fools.