Fall Festivities

[Welcome, visitors from Scribbit! If you want more holiday tales, you can always check out this post, or this one. Or any post from any December, really. Go ahead - it's free!]

We got up bright and early last Thanksgiving Day - not voluntarily, of course, but when you manage to get your 2-year-old to bed by 7 in the evening, you've got to accept that she is going to be chirping merrily in your ear around 6:30 AM. I went downstairs full of plans to make the house presentable and to finish cooking the dinner for our guests. Larry, it seems, had no such concerns about holiday hospitality. I mean, unless he felt that painting the front door this morning was the best way to show people how welcome they are in our house on Thanksgiving. So he painted for a while, and then he decided to while away some more time chipping off the extra concrete around the front stoop railings. A must-do item on anyone's get-ready-for-Thanksgiving list, I'm sure.

When is a day off not a day off? When I do all the things I normally do, plus try to keep the kids from wrecking Daddy's home improvement project. And I can't even go out tomorrow, as I have no desire to be mingling with all the crazies who get up at 4 AM to purchase some special at Best Buy or WalMart. (My apologies to any crazies who may be reading this, but really - you are freakin' nuts.)

Where was I? Oh, yes, our arsenic-phobic neighbor and her husband decided not to come over. I'm betting she heard that I cook the turkey in one of those plastic oven bags and decided not to risk it. The meal wasn't all I had hoped, as I managed to dry out the turkey and oversalt the stuffing. But no matter - I was so sick of all the food after cooking for 3 days straight that I had no desire to eat any of it anyway. My parents and my brother ate everything politely, and then my brother valiantly read several Curious George-type books to Rachel. I don't know how he managed to do that after eating turkey; even without L-tryptophan coursing through my bloodstream, I start falling asleep halfway through any of those stories. A weird, drugged sort o sleep, that I imagine to be kin to the feeling you'd get if you were slowly being poisoned by carbon monoxide.

Maybe it's old age. Or, perhaps, just a surfeit of parenting.

I don't want any more food ever. Well, except vanilla ice cream. I want that. Maybe I'll ask Larry to go out and get some. 7-11's open, right?

Oh, and I need to remember that I shouldn't buy sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving. No one likes them. And the kids just pick the marshmallows off the top. Next year, I'll skip the cooking and the scooping and the mashing and simply throw a bag of mini-marshmallows on the table instead. Problem solved.