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.

Thanks A Lot, Pilgrims!

Okay, time to quit supposing. It's not 20 years ago, we all have Thanksgiving dinners to prepare, and why am I wasting time in the blogosphere right now, anyway? Probably because I have a Thanksgiving dinner to prepare, but I don't know who's coming. We always wait until the last minute and invite whoever's alone (I mean, people that we know - not perfect strangers) to come eat. Those are the only people who might want to share their holiday with a teenage girl casting death glares at everyone, a whining 5-year-old, a spoiled 2-year-old girl (who's cute as a button, but loud), a 10-year-old vegetarian who nags people not to let their turkey touch his plate, and a 7-year-old boy who has just learned to burp at the table. And even then, the anticipated guest sometimes turns us down, thinking that one of those Swanson frozen dinners in the peace and quiet of his own home will do him just fine. In other words, we only get the truly desperate.

Thanksgiving just ain't what it used to be.

But that's okay, it will be over soon. And then there's Chanukah, because my side of the family's Jewish. Luckily, Theo likes to fry up potato latkes (anything to avoid doing his Chemistry homework); but I still need to locate the dreidels, the menorah, the candles, the Chanukah tablecloth - all of which (in an unfallen world) would be located in a box marked, well, Chanukah. But they aren't. And then I have to make the life-or-death decision of whether or not I can use the homemade applesauce from last year as a side for the latkes. Would you like your holiday celebration tainted with the risk of botulism, or no? It would certainly add a certain frisson of excitement to our party, I'm sure - like Russian Roulette, only more fatal.

And then, because I wasn't smart enough to marry within my faith and keep my life simple, we have Christmas. Throw in 2 flute recitals, the church Christmas pageant, and the New Year's Neighborhood Open House that I told everyone I was hosting, and things start getting a bit crazed around here. Because I'm expected to keep all my regular balls that I juggle up in the air while I take care of these extras.

But, I did manage to order the Christmas photocards, a task which was time consuming, folks, in the way, say, that evolution is time consuming. No matter that I have well over 2000 digital photos online for this past year. I had to find the right combo of four photos to show off each kid, plus I had to find a template which will offend neither side of the family (Christian and Jewish, remember? Thank Allah there are no Muslims to deal with), plus I had to make myriad other decisions (20 or 40? Photo or Stationery Paper? Express Ship? Text of Greeting?). In short, Larry found me actually sobbing at the keyboard at 10 last night, unable to navigate my way through the maze of choices being offered to me. He had to take over.

(Silver lining - I got to use a line from Casablanca: "Oh, I don't know what's right anymore," I said, in my best Ingrid Bergman voice. "You'll have to do the thinking for both of us.")

So that's done. And I remembered to start defrosting the turkey. What's up with all those weird safety instructions for thawing out old Tom, anyway? If cooking him for 5 hours doesn't kill whatever's dangerous, I don't think it matters how you defrost it. And no one's died yet. That's why I don't serve the applesauce at Thanksgiving - if someone did die, we wouldn't know which poisonous foodstuff to blame.

Hmm...getting a little morbid for the holidays, aren't we? Time to sign off - tomorrow's baking day and I need to defrost the pumpkin for the pies. (Just had to slip that hyperlink in there - it makes me feel so blog-savvy.)