The Three Thanksgivings

Newsletter 2024-12-02

I made it through three Thanksgivings. I feel like I survived a war. To most people, attending a trio of holiday feasts would be anything but a hardship. Those people have self-control, which is a form of witchcraft. I take everything to the max, especially when I shouldn’t. I might be the first person in history who was actually too thankful. If you need me, I’ll be hibernating until next year.

The first Thanksgiving struck early. As I’ve mentioned before, it was at my parents’ house in Illinois. We scheduled it before the official holiday to better accommodate my hordes of siblings coming in from destinations as varied as the other side of the country and the other side of my parents’ house. My brother Harry, the commercial airline pilot, had a convoluted scheme to make it back for the weekend. Of course it worked. The dumber his plans, the more likely they are to succeed. His life is impervious to both logic and karma. Harry flew stand-by with his wife and two kids from the East Coast to Chicago, rented a car, and drove three hours to Central Illinois, arriving at our childhood home that Friday afternoon. Saturday, he repeated the trip in reverse. He was on the ground in Illinois for approximately twenty minutes. That gave us just enough time to gush about how big his kids have gotten and to ask him what the heck is going on with his life. The answer was that even he doesn’t know. With the way his job works, he isn’t sure where he’ll be a month from now, let alone a year from now. That didn’t stop me from pushing for us to schedule a brothers-only trip sometime next summer. I put his odds of showing up at that event at fifty-fifty. With free flights, off-the-charts stubbornness, and inexplicable luck, you can never count him out. With two toddlers, you can never count him all the way in. Like a wizard, he shows up exactly when he intends to—if he intends to at all. The rest of the time, he’s off fighting ring wraiths. His existence has taught me that excitement is a curse.

For me, Thanksgiving at my parents house was a two-day affair. I drove there on my own that Friday. Lola had work and the kids had school. It’s their own fault for not having retired or graduated already. My third grader should really buckle down. My brothers Harry and Mitchell and their families were the only other arrivals that Friday afternoon, not counting Nathaniel, who still lives in my parents’ house, and Arthur, who lives two doors away. I drove home that night, as is my custom, to sleep in my own bed. Saturday, I made the hour-long trip to Illinois again, this time with my whole family. We drove home that night. It wasn’t the most impressive round trip of the day. That honor went to both of my sisters who live in Missouri. They each drove (separately) four hours that morning only to do the four hours back before bedtime. If my family stands for anything, it’s sleeping in our own homes. Don’t ever get between us and our mattresses.

Both days, I ate entirely too much. I started out under control but went off the rails when it got dark outside and the temperature dropped. That’s when my European peasant instincts kicked in. My body wanted to pack on fat to survive the winter. You never know when the potato stockpile might run out. My mom didn’t ask me to cook anything for our big Thanksgiving meal. She requested only that I bring Halloween candy. It’s like she thought we had a surplus or something. I also brought fruit, which is a healthy snack until you eat seven pounds of it in one sitting. I had to do it. My peasant ancestors went their entire lives without seeing a single strawberry. I’d be dishonoring their memory if I didn’t eat myself sick on them now. The main thing I was thankful for that day was that I didn’t have to share. If anybody else wanted strawberries, they should have brought their own.

One stockpile we didn’t touch was my board games. As usual, I brought a giant bag of my finest cardboard amusements. They stayed in that bag all weekend. We spent the early holiday learning about each other’s lives and connecting on a human level. What a waste. I made up for it this Thursday. On the official Thanksgiving holiday, we had nowhere to be. We turned it into a friendsgiving at our house. We invited over our board game pals Peter and Delilah and our fitness friend Bread, so named because he hasn’t had a carb since he was twelve. Besides sugar, his other kryptonite is human contact. He can only tolerate us in small doses. After an hour or so, he simply wants to be alone in his own house. I get it. If I had a bachelor pad, I would never leave. He used to make up excuses when he wanted to bolt. Classic exit lines included that he had to do a Zoom call with his mom and that he needed to paint behind his toilet. We’ve since made it clear that he can take off without pretext, although he’s still welcome to toss out a poorly-fabricated excuse for entertainment purposes. Life is better with flavor text. This time, however, we accidentally broke our promise of an easy, guilt-free exit thanks to a little game called Battlestar Galactica.

If you’re a normal person, that title means nothing to you. If you’re a hobby board gamer, it strikes fear in your heart. Battlestar Galactica is a cooperative hidden-traitor game set in the sci-fi universe of the same name. If you stay focused, you can finish it in three to four hours. We were anything but focused. We were doomed by our own generosity. At a charity auction more than a year ago, we “won” a home wine tasting party. We finally got around to hosting it this spring. The tasting might have been free (outside of all the money we donated to get it) but the buying most definitely was not. It was basically an alcoholic Tupperware party. The whole point of the evening was for the wine expert to sell us expensive bottles. I don’t mean the kind you find at international wine auctions. I’m referring to bottles that are thirty or forty dollars each, which is still way too much. The perfect price for wine is $3.99 per bottle. Anything more than that is putting on airs. After a sip each from a dozen different vintages that fateful night, we were tragically loose with our purchases. We ordered too many bottles, to be delivered at a future date. Because of the way this wholesale company operated, everyone at the wine party had to put their bottle requests on a single order, which would show up at my house for me to distribute. I hoped the wine guy lost our sheet, but he didn’t. A month later, hundreds of dollars worth of wine materialized on my front porch. We distributed them to various attendees. A month after that, the same order showed up again. I panicked.

I envisioned a future where this wine distributor kept sending me wine each month, bankrupting my household and destroying my liver. I called to complain. Actually, I had Lola call because I was driving us to Wisconsin at the time. I was so eager to stop the flow of wine that it couldn’t even wait till we got back from vacation. We failed to get through to anybody, but we left a message. After a few more tries, we finally reached the delivery driver, who said he would ask someone about it. He never did. Nobody ever called us back, showed up to collect the wine, or billed us. As far as their records go, that bonus order of wine fell off a truck. After six months of waiting to see if we’d be charged or have to give it back, we finally decided to drink the stuff. The date we set was friendsgiving. That didn’t make Bread feel very thankful at all.

To the surprise of no one, fancy wine did nothing to improve our rate of play at an incredibly complicated board game. We started around 10 a.m.. By noon, we were still in the early phases. We stayed at the table and asked the kids to make grilled cheese sandwiches for everyone. My fourteen-year-old is too old and wise to care about impressing adults, but my other three daughters fell for it. They took the task seriously. My ten-year-old, Lucy, came around with a pad of paper to take everyone’s orders. She even asked us how we wanted our sandwiches cut. She expected us to say diagonally or vertically. Feeling feisty, Peter requested that his grilled cheese be cut in one-inch cubes. To his surprise and delight, he received a platter of grilled cheese squares. Afterwards, I checked the kitchen and found a ruler on the island. They actually measured. They’re good eggs sometimes.

The game finally wrapped up around 6 p.m., eight hours after we started. Bread would have liked to have left after the first sixty minutes. He couldn’t quit, though, because unknown to all of us, he was our secret robot enemy. He made us pay for the extra socialization we forced upon him. He was the solo winner, wiping out humanity on behalf of machines everywhere. After spending all day with us, I’m guessing that’s actually how many people he wishes were left in the world. We won’t see him again until next Thanksgiving, or maybe the Thanksgiving after that. Even for people who like people, eight hours of us is too much.

The final Thanksgiving was also at our house. We hosted Lola’s parents and siblings Saturday. It wasn’t as Herculean of a task as it could have been. Most of the dishes, including the turkey, were handled by visiting family members. Lola made macaroni and sweet potato casserole. Those are two separate side dishes, although combining them could be interesting. Lola rejected that great idea. The biggest meal of the year is no time for experimentation. My contribution was to cut up the fruit and buy some discount pies. Clearly I was the MVP of the kitchen.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

My proudest accomplishment as a husband is that I’ve lessened Lola’s feelings of shame over the state of our house. I didn’t make it any cleaner. I just established such a regular rotation of social events that she no longer cares what people think of us. They know who we are and how we live. There’s no going back. Before we hosted Thanksgiving, instead of panic cleaning, we cleaned with mild alarm. Things didn’t get tense until the final hour before the guests arrived. It was only then that I noticed the pigs’ troughs had frozen solid on our enclosed back porch. I dumped out one trough and moved it inside to the pig room. Then I set about refilling it. If you want to truly test the strength of your marriage, in the final minutes before hosting Thanksgiving, tell your wife you need to take over the kitchen sink to fill up buckets for a pig trough. We’re still married, but it was close.

The meal itself went off without a hitch. We had more pies than people, which is the proper ratio. My brother-in-law Jerry’s smoked turkey was to die for. To date, he remains the only person who can make that particular bird edible. Outside of his hands, the turkey does not deserve its place of honor at Thanksgiving. If it were up to me, we’d all eat Thanksgiving pizza. That would help keep the sink clear in case I needed any emergency water for the pigs. I made it through all three Thanksgivings, but I’m glad I have another year before I have to do that again. Now it’s time to rest and recuperate—until I have three Christmases in a few weeks. Bread will definitely be painting behind his toilet all month.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James