Thanksgiving Blessing

     When you think of Thanksgiving, do you conjure up a mental image of a Norman Rockwell painting?  Do you envision your entire extended family, full of good cheer, assembled around the table, smiling broadly in anticipation of the feast?   Or do you do you relive a Thanksgiving horror story?  Back when I was working, I asked my coworkers to recount their Thanksgivings gone awry.

     Some of their stories were merely amusing anecdotes with no real damage done.  After too many glasses of Riesling, one host cooked the turkey up-side-down.  Everybody had a laugh before flipping the main course and carving it up.  Another absent minded cook left the giblets in the bird finding them, still wrapped in paper, when she unloaded the stuffing.  Almost every year a women’s magazine or day time TV cook recommends roasting turkeys for hours and hours at a very low temperature.  One of my coworkers tested this method only to learn that the meat falls off the bones and the skeleton collapses.  That year their holiday main course was a tasty, but unattractive pile.

       Thanksgiving pulls families together from far and wide.  People feel obligated to spend the day with relatives when they should have stayed home.  My own horror story occurred the year my sister announced her second pregnancy by throwing up at the table.  Worse than this, one family’s nightmare occurred when the grandmother, taxed beyond her limits by holiday travel, suffered a heart attack.  Grandmom had just signed a “Do Not Resuscitate” order.  While the EMT’s worked on Granny, her daughter demanded that she be allowed to die.  The old lady survived and, hopefully, was comforted by the fact that her child was willing to carry out her final wishes.     

     Sometimes the traditional turkey meets a fate worse than roasting.  Erma Bombeck told of setting the oven to self-clean and incinerating her entrée.  I recommend locking up the pets.  One of my respondents told me that their eighteen-pound gobbler was reduced to an eighteen-ounce carcass by the family dog when the cook went upstairs to take a shower.  In another household, Fido grabbed a bird twice his size, dragged it down the steps, and wrestled it through the doggie door and into the back yard.  A brave uncle gave chase, and a tug-of-war ensued.  Finally, the uncle appeared in the kitchen with the thieving dog under his arm, the turkey still dangling from its mouth.

     This is the time of year to thank God for our good fortune and to wish each other the best in the coming year.  But for some of us a Thanksgiving blessing might be, “May your turkey always be properly thawed.  May you never drop it and watch horrified as it skids across the dining room floor.  May you never lose your giblets.  And if you do, may you have a hearty laugh about it for years to come."    

    HAPPY TURKEY DAY, EVERYONE