From Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving: Looking Back on a Year of Gossip Girl

It's the holidays that remind us what's truly important, and today, reading NY Mag's reality index of last Thanksgiving's Gossip Girl, I am thankful for a full year of Monday nights spent with friends and frienemies of the Upper East Side: from the good times, when Blair exposed her slip at a burlesque club then lost it to Chuck Bass in the back of a limo, to the bad, when Vanessa Abrams first barged -- wearing too many colors and not enough discretion -- into Dan's bedroom and our lives. And of course there's nothing like a writers' strike to make us appreciate everything in between.

Monday may not have been Gossip Girl and my official one-year anniversary (I started watching at Season 1, Episode 2), but it did mark the moment when the excitement of a new show cooled down, I stopped weighing her pros and cons, we had our first quasi-fight, I thought to myself, She's beautiful despite her flaws, and decided I was in it for the long haul.

Remembering Gossip Girl...

Only One Year Ago:

--Blair loved Nate.
--2006 sepia-colored drunk Serena was almost killed by a car, but Dan Humphrey saved her.
--Jenny ate lunch on the steps of the Met.
--Chuck was a minor character and tragically not in this episode.
--We thought that Eric was straight and would inevitably itemize with Jenny.
--Gossip Girl employed flash-backs. (How adorably naive!)
--Blair visited the Humphrey home. ("You know what's really weird, is that there's a garage door in your room.")
--Dan and Jenny had a mom.
--Dan and Jenny put on sweaters and played football in the park with their parents.
--Blair developed spontaneous bulimia and went apeshit on a pie.

They were good times, weren't they? Gossip Girl, if you're reading this, Happy Anniversary. I love you.