by ·0 Comments

Thanksgiving and Christmas in my family is a small affair. There aren’t many of us in the area. I enjoy entertaining but am used to having between three and five courses for 18 to 30 people. So a family get together is small compared to what I’m used to. Then again, it’s family.

I asked my mother to bring cheese and crackers and she asked not to as she didn’t want people to fill up ahead of time. Ok. She provided cranberry sauce and my brother and his wife brought potatoes.

I arrived about 90 minutes before the target plating time and set to work. Much of it was simply waiting as two dishes needed to finished in the oven, one had to be brought to temperature in a water bath, and two needed to chill. Everyone asked if there was anything they could do to help. Everything went out within about five minutes of one another and I was pleased. Normally my timing isn’t quite so tight.

The first course was the noodle salad which my dad eyed suspiciously. He may not encounter eggplant and mango often nor does he probably like toasted sesame seed. He had a forkful, noted that it wasn’t for him, and went on to the other courses. My heart sank a little but in short order the bread was demolished followed by a healthy portions of everything else.

At the end of the meal my uncle looked at me and said “I’ve never eaten so much”. This wasn’t a casual observation so much as I felt like he was sharing a secret. My brother commented “the food was all good”. There’s two ways to take this phrase, indicating that each food item were good or that the food was sufficient. If the former, that marks the first time my brother has ever complimented my food. Unlike after most holidays, my uncle, father, mother, and brother each volunteered to take something home with them. I hadn’t seen this before.

This wasn’t the first family holiday meal I’d done but it was the first to receive such a positive response. My mother once commented “I can see how people like your baking but it doesn’t really do much for me”. My dad has commented on how entrees “weren’t dry enough for my me”. I don’t know if this marks some progress in my cooking abilities or something else. This was my nephew’s second Thanksgiving, but the first where he had the same food as us. I think that somehow made things tastier.

by ·0 Comments

Thanksgiving passed without incident. So much so that I had some line left in my drama rope and decided to install Windows 8 on my main desktop. Even that went smoothly. Hm….

My uncle came up from Delaware and appetizers and cheeses came out at around 3pm. The turkey was done by 6pm and everything else was done and out for the dinner proper at 7pm. I am currently eating low carb and couldn’t have any of the desserts I had made, but my uncle had brought a cheesecake and a can of whipped cream. Whipped cream, while tasting sweet, has almost no sugar in it. The whipped cream didn’t survive the night.

Everyone left after a main course of three meats at around 10pm and on the way out my uncle looked at me and said “I just realized, you did everything tonight. Thank you, Terry?” This moment of “I’m Ron Burgundy?” was more touching than strange. At no point prior had my uncle reason to really thank me. He was the uncle that gave the great Christmas presents, he was the uncle that hosted the best game night parties, he was the uncle that had the pool. Now I was the nephew hosting Thanksgiving.

by ·0 Comments

Peter and I slept in and caught a late lunch at Jimmy John’s where we talked for about 3.5 hours.

Every day of this trip was wonderful.  Thank you, Chris, Christine, Suzie, Chad, Peter, and Audrey for supporting my nomadic notion of Thanksgiving.

Chicago to Philadelphia is a little under 800 miles and I made the trip home with no more than 10 minute gas/food stops and while listening to The Bonfire of the Vanities with a brief “OH GOD GIVE ME MUSIC NOT WORDS” break across Ohio.  I arrived home tired but neither aggravated nor worn down and I am glad I can still be old iron butt and pound out 800 miles in a day.

by ·0 Comments

The Cast:

5465-Thanksgiving-20111124.jpg

Soldier, Scholar, Beer-Consumer

Jon, brother of Christine.  Here he ponders Bucky Balls.

5479-Thanksgiving-20111124.jpg

Farty Love?

Chris and Christine, my hosts.

<Picture of me not found>

Me!

I slept in after getting a message from a friend that he wanted to be my valentine.  I showered, broke the curtain rod, kludged it up, where upon it promptly broke when Jon then showered.

Dinner was a full standard deviation better than most Thanksgivings I’ve had and the sweat potato casserole was hardly the emetic I expected; I normally hate sweet potatoes.  Christine told me that the casserole is a way to sneak a dessert into the main course by getting brown sugar and pecans into the human body as efficiently as possible.  I support this wisdom.

During grace, we each listed what we were thankful for, a ritual that is not totally alien to me but here I was thrown off as it was genuine with a patina of homespun simplicity Ralph Lauren would burn down a church to achieve.  A sample from a traditional Robinson family statement of thanks: I’m thankful that the IRS didn’t pick up on how ridiculous my vehicle expenses were, that I got away mailing so much stuff as media mail when it should have been parcel post, and that EZ-Pass prices have not increased.  Chris, Christine, and Jon listed the loved ones in their life where as I listed my car and giant printer as my key pieces of thanks.  Apparently one should mention material possessions at such times.  Not to say I am not thankful for my family,  good health, stable job, friends, coworkers, general inclination of humanity away from violence, etc but those things are givens to me in a way that neither printers nor especially cars have been.  Remember, I was abandoned at school for my first day of college when I could find the pair of pliers required to properly jump the station wagon I was driving, and that was the sixth car I had driven in the previous 18 months.

We retired to the couches, made things out of Bucky Balls while watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.  I felt antsy and asked Chris to go for a walk with me.  For next year, I will say I am thankful for friends that don’t tire easily as our “stroll around his apartment complex” covered 5.6 miles.  Oh, and I’m thankful for my Fitbit pedometer.

 

by ·0 Comments

Thanksgiving has become my traveling holiday.  Everyone else in the family has something to do and it’s easy to make it a six day weekend.  This year, I am planning on making a three stopper in West Viriginia, Ohio, and Indiana before a return late Monday.

I left a little after from work for Cross Lanes with a listening queue consisting of the books Blood Meridian, Atlas Shrugged, Bonfire of the Vanities, and back issues of Intelligence Squared: US.  I started listening to the IQ2 episodes which meshed poorly with traffic on the PA Turnpike.  Worse than dealing with rubberneckers going by a car wreck is dealing with rubberneckers going by a car wreck while some toolbag from the the CATO Institute makes non-points about Keynesian economics who can’t hear me yelling at him.  The traffic and by podcast backlog cleared and I started listening to Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s magnus opus of violence in the Southwest around 1850.  By the time I had arrived at Chris’s house near 12:30 AM, about 200 people had died from fires, gunshots, broken bottles, knives, fist fights, and scalpings.  Foreshadowing?

The reception by Chris and Christine was warm but their apartment smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and beer.  They were hosting Christine’s brother who is active duty in the Navy.  Maybe I would be reminded of home this Thanksgiving after all.  We stayed up too late talking and I braced for Turkey Day in a strange land.

by ·0 Comments

Ashley, Alex and I had stayed up late and rose for Thanksgiving day around 2 PM.  I contacted Mitch who was to be the host for Thanksgiving and received a nebulous response of “my shoulder hurts and I’m hung over.  Fuck Thanksgiving” when I asked him about a good arrival time.  I indicated he’d be shark chum if he canceled and we arrived around 4 PM to him preparing shells and cheese.  We and he had very different definitions of what a Thanksgiving meal consisted of so after he called around for someone who had overprepared and found none, we left to find a super market that was still open.  As we traveled from closed Publix to closed Publix we found something magical, a Thanksgiving Carnival.

To me, traveling carnivals seem to be exercises in self-parody like this gem:

20101125-untitled-112

You couldn’t pay an artist to have a more depressing arrangement of lights that could shatter the dreams of a child.  They had the obligatory rides and vendors of foodstuffs as well as the Photoshop booth where one is chromakeyed into some sort of shot.  Being a sucker for farce I asked “do you have something with rainbows, a unicorn, and possibly some teen pop icon”, she said yes and later we received the following:

20101129-5117-badpic

Alex bought a funnel cake and I went on a hunt for an Italian sausage and, finding a well equipped food stand, saw they had turkey.  We asked if it was available and were told “that’s for us”.  This redoubled our efforts at finding an open grocer and, after winning a gold fish, we continued driving.

Walmart was still open and after a brief debate between “make it ourselves” vs.  “Golden Corral” the former won and we purchased Thanksgiving.  All the parts assembled, we were nearly back to Mitch’s house when his aunt called.  Apparently both she and Mitch’s grandmother had prepared a raft of food, not knowing the other would and our purchases turned into a talisman against hunger.

On the way back, Ashley noticed that the floor of my car by her feet was wet, very wet and I chalked it up to something having spilled.  Otherwise, Thanksgiving turned out surprisingly ok.

by ·0 Comments

I dislike the artificiality of the gatherings for most holidays especially in my family where manufacturing the false sense of togetherness that rivals the false closure of the Treaty of Versailles.  As our clan slowly shed the traditional vestiges of Thanksgiving the loss of “What I’m Thankful For” has lifted my spirits the most as the non-specific engendered supplication always smacked of sanctimony in my book.  This year, my mother, father, and I went to the Buck Hotel and had their Thanksgiving special.  The service was mediocre at best and I nearly rendered the hostess catatonic when I stated so but a sliver of light jabbed against the jejune and made the event worthwhile.

While waiting for our food to arrive,the large table behind us began to do their “What I’m Thankful For” ritual when drug to a halt with a young girl who droned on about loving school, colored paper.  After three or four such prosaic mentionings some octogenarian at the table piped up with “sometime today, dear”.

by ·0 Comments

Coworker: I just got an email that it’s a half-day does that mean we leave at noon?
Me: Yes.
Coworker: Do we have to, I’m a contractor?
Me: No, you don’t have to leave but if you don’t you have a delicate balance.  Staying reminds others that you’re effectively a second-class citizen or makes them feel that their work isn’t important.
Coworker: But if I leave they might think my project isn’t as important as it actually is or they’ll say “look at the contractor, taking every opportunity to leave”.
Me: Exactly, life gets tough when your firm tries to be nice.
Coworker: I got it, I’ll leave now with the rush of people, get lunch and come back so the other people who think their stuff is important will think my stuff’s important.
Me: Now you’re thinking.

by ·0 Comments

Every Thanksgiving my father and I have a cullinary show down.  This year I won the battle between brining the turkey and serving a block of sawdust and was prepared to begin another battle: stuffing.  My father insisted on meat stuffing which I thought was just preparing the stuffing in the bird, but in this case it was preparing the stuffing with ground beef,  I was incensed.  Replacing sugars with high fructose corn syrup I can handle, using partially hydrogenated soybean oil instead of lard I can deal, using textural tricglycerides and monosodium glutimate as flavor-enhancers I will grow to accept, but stuffing one animal inside of another is going too far.  One day, he will be eaten by an elephant and know God’s cruel irony.

by ·0 Comments

Every Thanksgiving my father and I have a cullinary show down.  This year I won the battle between brining the turkey and serving a block of sawdust and was prepared to begin another battle: stuffing.  My father insisted on meat stuffing which I thought was just preparing the stuffing in the bird, but in this case it was preparing the stuffing with ground beef,  I was incensed.  Replacing sugars with high fructose corn syrup I can handle, using partially hydrogenated soybean oil instead of lard I can deal, using textural tricglycerides and monosodium glutimate as flavor-enhancers I will grow to accept, but stuffing one animal inside of another is going too far.  One day, he will be eaten by an elephant and know God’s cruel irony.