Monday, November 26, 2012

Chicken Day of the Yam Meltdown


Happy Thanksgiving. I know its late. Think of it as cold turkey....leftovers!
Cold turkey has two meanings and both of them are kind of awful...we should talk about that soon. Remind me.

Growing up, my older sister decided early on that I was responsible for all of the evil or inconvenient things that happened. Ever. Especially on holidays, and almost every Thanksgiving. Before me, she was the only girl. Even after my older brother was born, she was fine. But by the time I rolled around, she knew this was not good. The shit show of way too many kids was well on its way and I was the sign of the apocalypse. Therefore, it was all my fault. It is now a joke in my family to say "Thanks for ruining____________, Velvet!"

My brother said to me this year- Hey, where is someone to tell you how you are ruining everything? I offered that he could do it, but seeing as how he was eating food I prepared, he probably didn't feel up to it. (Did I mention he lives with us right now and I do most of his laundry/cooking/dishes?) Yeah..so he put another deviled egg in his mouth and hummed away.

I tried to ruin Thanksgiving, folks. I put all my effort into it. To no avail.

My mother is practically MIA on holidays anymore, two of our siblings live far away and my two younger siblings are single, so we do a little something at my house. This year, my sister reminded me how much she hates turkey (birthday too close to Thanksgiving her whole life) so I got rotisserie chickens from Costco (I KNOW!), cornbread stuffing and the pre-cut veggies from Trader Joe's, cranberries courtesy of Ocean Spray and then I made candied yams and deviled eggs so I could say, "I've been slavin' over this for hours, y'all!"

It worked. No one cared. Except my nephew. Who hates food. Not all food, just the ones made for Thanksgiving. Because he is four years old. We tried to feed him a bite of yam and endured 5 minutes of crying, interrupted by the view of chewed yam rolling around. This kid has serious will. He would not eat it. Finally I decided that was enough, handed him a napkin and told him I was done talking about yams. He rewarded me by sweetly asking if he could now have a "Shmarlow". How frickin' cute is that? I almost died. Yam meltdown forgiven. Two shmarlows for you, young child.

Our Thanksgiving was overflowing with the joy and gratefulness of the season, since I only had to lay eyes on my stepdaughter's mother one time for about 20 seconds. My cup overflows with gladness. Even though they picked her up almost an hour early. I shit you not. I still have no idea how that beautiful creature emerged from the DNA shared by these people. Miracle of life right there.

But in the end, we all got where we were going, we ate food, drank wine, played games and made snowflakes, everyone was safe and no one went hungry and that is so much more than we realize. I'm grateful that we have it so good. I hope you do as well.




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