Thanksgiving 2012

Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving.  Any holiday where you sit around eating all day, watching football and listening to people tell me how thankful they are for me is my kind of day.  In our family we’ve always been pretty traditional.  Growing up, I ate olives off my fingers for about three hours straight while watching the Lions lose with my Dad and friends and then stuffed myself painfully full with turkey for the next three days straight.  I married a similarly awesome traditional Thanksgiving girl.  With the exception of a very fun and drunken fried turkey Thanksgiving that I barely remember during our first year in Denver, I’ve had 31 great traditional Thanksgivings. 

Enter 2012.  We planned to have Steph and Peter come up for the day and my co-worker Rick, who’s a great guy, also came over.  Our kitchen is pretty small and Jenn was trying to figure out how to work the turkey and all the sides with the limited space.  The schedule looked something like:

Wed

09:15 – Begin making pumpkin pie

09:45 – Begin making pumpkin pie #2

10:30 – Begin making cherry Pie #1

10:45 – Begin making cherry Pie #2

11:00 – Begin making cherry Pie #3 – yes, you need 3 cherry pies

11:30 – Refrigerate all said pies

12:00 – Clean bathrooms

01:00 – Sweep floors

02:00 – Wash dishes

03:00 – Dust the furniture

04:00 – Sweep floors (again – the kids eat like a dinosaur having a seizure)

Thurs

10:00 – Prepare the stuffing in the microwave

10:15 – Begin roasting the turkey in the oven

11:30 – Prepare the crostinis on the grill pan

11:45 – Cook the bacon wrapped mushrooms on the stove

12:00 – Bring out the appetizers, place olives on kids’ fingers

01:00 – Put the kids down for nap

01:30 – Prepare the sweet potatoes in the Crockpot

01:45 – Baste the turkey

02:30 – Prepare the mashed potatoes in the mixer

02:45 – Begin sautéing the green beans on the skillet

02:55 – Open the can of cranberries – yea we’re not very creative here

03:00 – Wake up the kids from nap

03:30 – Serve dinner

…or we could just order in.  Peter and Steph found an amazing alternative: a barbeque place by their house was offering a full Thanksgiving dinner for $25 a person.  Screw tradition.

So Steph and Peter picked up six Thanksgiving dinners on Wednesday morning, drove up from Charlottesville and the Thanksgiving weekend was upon us.  It was a great time.  We hung out with the kids, played Mario Kart when they went to bed and had a delicious pre-made dinner.  Jenn and Peter couldn’t help themselves and still kept pretty busy in the kitchen making appetizers, cookies, French onion soup and mashed potatoes.

We had a great time, although as the night wore on, I found myself thinking more and more about tradition.  We finished the evening the same way we’ve finished our last few Thanksgivings:  by groaning over a half-eaten piece of pie and watching Punkin’ Chunkin.  Punkin’ Chunkin’ is a great show that Jenn’s Dad introduced me to a few years ago.  Crazy yet oddly brilliant people from Delaware and the surrounding area get together and compare pumpkin hurling devices they’ve spent all year building.  The designs include: trebuchets, catapults, air cannons and my favorite, the centrifugal force machines.  We had a fun break from tradition this year, but I’m looking forward to getting back to Colorado and perfecting our traditions.  The only downside of going back is not having Steph and Peter around.  No Thanksgiving is complete without someone making fun of my body wave (Steph) and someone bringing me a beer I didn’t ask for (Peter). 

So whether you were at the China Buffet or making stuffing the way your mom used to, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  I sure did.