Gee, compared to some of your stories, having ankle deep raw sewage in my basement Thanksgiving morning doesn’t seem like much.
The tree out front managed to block the drain line totally, and of course it had to happen on a day when all the hardware stores were closed. I refused to pay a plumber $300 to come out and do a 15 minute job, so it had to wait until Friday morning when I could rent a sewer rodder from the local Ace.
The food was great. We had to wait until Friday afternoon to do the dishes though.
I have nothing to report for myself this year. I stayed at home by myself and heated up the chicken-black bean chili I’d made the day before. Later, a friend came by with her boyfriend and I fed them chili and pie. No drama, no fuss, no muss. We all enjoyed playing with my new dog.
But last year is a story worth reporting. I wasn’t even there, so I’ll tell it like I was, but this is all second-hand information from my sister.
Background: We’re talking about the blended family – my dad’s 2 kids (me & my sis) and my stepmonster’s 5 kids (probably all of 'em weren’t there). All of the grandchildren are adults now so some of them are married and have children, so. Several generations were all there, had the big happy turkey meal and were settling down to video games and football, post-food coma.
A couple of the great-grandkids were playing video games and apparently got sort of loud and animated. My father, who has a terrible temper, piss-poor impulse control, and even worse communication skills, stewed about this until he was really pissed off. It never occurs to him to simply ask the parents to get the kids to dial it back or quiet down a bit. The kids weren’t hurting anything or being extraordinarily obnoxious, according to my sister (who has a low tolerance for brats, so I’m taking her word they were just being kids, loud, but not really doing anything wrong).
Dad, completely out of the blue, leaps out of his chair and while he’s screaming at the kids to knock it off, he grabs the closest one by the neck of his shirt, physically lifts him off the floor, and throws him on to a nearby couch. Naturally, the kid’s dad – my dad’s step-grandson – steps in and has a few words with my dad. More words were exchanged, and IIRC, my sister said the whole thing ended with “Don’t you ever come back to my house ever again!”, which was followed closely by, “Fuck you, you crazy old man, we wouldn’t want to.”
For the first time in 20 years, I was actually sorry I wasn’t there to witness such a crowning moment of awesome family holiday suckitude.
The only reason this is relevant this year is because it was never dealt with or discussed in any way among the family members. Another brick in the wall, right? My sister reported to me this year that none of my stepmom’s kids invited her and dad over to their place and dad had told my sister that he wasn’t interested in inviting people over “because they come over, tear stuff up, steal things, make a mess and leave”. My sister made dinner at my mom’s house for her kids and our mom. Dad called me after his trip to Golden Corral.
I called my sister to report that “the crazy old man” had probably burned his last holiday-family bridge and had called me post-Golden Corral. He didn’t bitch about anything at all though (not that he asked me about my Thanksgiving either) so I considered that a good year. My sister and step-siblings made sure the only thing he had to bitch about this year were his own choices at the buffet. (He said he thought the food was good and he was happy, although he’d wanted frog legs and they didn’t have any on the buffet for Thanksgiving.)
So yeah, seeing as how any holiday with my parents could (and probably will) turn out the way it did last year, I was perfectly delighted to sit at home with the dog, not travel, not cook and clean all day and do little else except a spot of obedience training and some old movie watching.
OMG. I think you win.
I spent Thanksgiving with my in-laws instead of my own parents, so the day did not have the “awesome family holiday suckitude” of years past. (Mother = passive-agressive control freak, while MIL = slightly dotty but quite delightful.)
Crowning moment for me was when my MIL and her sister (Mr. Horseshoe’s aunt) dubbed me The Carcass Queen.
We bought a new house in July - it has a fabulous kitchen and a nice dining room, I invited my family and friends to have Thanksgiving at our house this year. I am 42 and it was my first time ever hosting a major holiday dinner - 8 guests.
First snag:
It is a very long story, but we had never assembled our new dining room table. My husband put it together on Saturday and it turns out we were missing 2 very important pieces (to stabilize the base). We have a woodworking contact that is going to fix it, but it wouldn’t be ready by Thanksgiving. So, I scrap my plan for a gorgeous Thanksgiving table with china and a fancy tablecloth, we’ll all just crowd around the kitchen table and serve off the island.
Second snag:
Thanksgiving Day, around 10:30 (half an hour before the rest of the guests were to arrive), noticed that the clock on the stove wasn’t working. That’s weird! Turns out, the sensor profile that controls our GE profile oven blew. We still had power (oven light turned on), gas (burners worked!) but no way to control the oven. Minor hyperventilating until we discovered the dial on the front that controlled the small (very small) bottom warming oven. Luckily, we had planned to make turkey wellingtons anyway, so they fit beautifully in the bottom warming oven. I had made the pumpkin cheesecake the night before, so we just baked everything we needed in the warming oven.
Everything turned out beautifully in the end.
I spent much of it (took week off) at the Colorado ranch with a metal detector. There’s a dozen old stone homesites from the 1800s I’d wanted to check out and this finally gave me some free time to do so. I found lots of horse and wagon-related gear like cinch buckles, tethers, bridle bits, chain, plates, porcelain jar lid linings, cartridge shells, kitchen utensils, etc. In one old root cellar there were still jars resting undisturbed on a leaning shelf.
I tried a couple of newer ones too, from the early 1900s, but generally they had far too much iron laying around to keep from getting a lot of false hits, nails, wire, etc. For those I built a screen to sieve stuff through but will hit that harder next time.
If nothing else though I had my iPhone camera and got some absolutely beautiful shots of the old places, like those of distant mesas framed through an old door or window. I’ll try and get those moved to a hosting site and will share later. I also visited many of the pictographs that adorn some of the canyon walls. That never gets old, seeing those again.
Perhaps nicest though, or at least the most theraputic was just getting out in the wild where you can’t hear or see another person in the world for the better part of a full day. You’re completely alone, surrounded by beautiful nature and left to your thoughts as you dig through the evidence of lives long past.
Why didn’t you just let her sing with you?
:eek::eek::eek: Holy Christ on a gurney, Batman. You win, indeed. Hope your dad is ok.
Gosh… after reading these, my mother taking a tumble on Friday and giving herself a concussion seems like a non-event.
That sounds so peaceful. I’ve got to find a way to do something like that around here.
[QUOTE=black rabbit]
Turns out the “stroke” was really a vasovagal response to the bleeding, and the bleeding is a complication of the elective prostate surgery he had about a month ago.
[/QUOTE]
I wasn’t aware there was such a thing as elective prostate surgery. Eeek. Best wishes for a quick recovery.
Are your husbands usually this…(searches for a nice word for “assholes”) thoughtless?
Heh. I was thinking the same thing. Either of those situations would have preceded battles royale that would have truly been worth mentioning as Thanksgiving disasters for years to come.
After reading this thread, I am feeling much less sorry for myself about getting a stomach bug while at my parents’ for the holiday. Much less. Positively grateful, in fact, which I supposed is appropriate for Thanksgiving.
That was my response too. If you guys were just dicking around–what was the harm?
It sounded to me like they were working on a project and really wanted a good recording in case they had good ideas; her singing was distracting them and would have made hearing anything on the recording difficult.
It’d be like a writer brainstorming some ideas and asking for a little quiet time, and Mom reading over his/her shoulder and trying to put in ideas.
Sure, they could have let her sing. But most people would assume that after the second request, she’d let them work and just be happy to listen, rather than getting dramatic about it.
We combined Thanksgiving with a wedding on Saturday. The Wedding on the holiday weekend allowed more people to come due to travel. More people, however, means we include ex-spouses and estranged children. The resultant insanity has resulted in several members of the family not speaking to each other, and a set of divorce papers being filed this week.
I was only on the periphery, but got to watch the train wreck from ringside seats starting Friday afternoon at the rehearsal, then rehearsal dinner, then pre-wedding photographs, the wedding and finally the reception. Emails, Facebook messages, and cell phone texts were flying fast and hard, with blind copies all around for joyful sharing around the living room or hotel. I spent much of the event wondering where certain family members were, or were not, or were supposed to be, etc.
The meal itself was great!
Now I feel more guilty about letting the single toddler and the one preschooler we had over get me down. Hardly tragic, but hella annoying.
Their parents are some of our best friends and I don’t feel like I can say anything about their acting-out offspring. And they are apparently coming for Christmas, too… I guess I will go ahead and get some coloring books, not that I think that will work when it’s all about getting the attention of the adults. But really, why in hell wouldn’t you even bring some trusty movies and/or toys for your 2 and 5 year old girls so the adults can try to have a little conversation?
It was overall a fine Thanksgiving - no blood, no fights, no food poisoning - but after they left, the rest of us just breathed out and reaffirmed our child-free choice.
Holy crap. I’m sure that wasn’t what you guys had in mind for dessert!
I hope he is okay now.
Traveled 6 hours to visit Sonny Boy and his family. All was well until Thanksgiving morning when on the way to their house from our hotel car broke down. Towed it to repair shop the next morning and had it fixed 6 hours later at a cost of $2334.00 :smack:. Upside, it did not happen on the road or cause an accident. The meal was good though.
We were just sitting down to the big dinner at my brother’s house when someone called my sister-in-law to let her know my nephew was in a wreck, pinned in the car and wanted to talk to her since they didn’t know how bad off he was. It wasn’t as horrific as it sounded at first, not even a scratch although he’s very sore and the car is totaled. Still, they spent the night with him in the ER so it wasn’t a pleasant Thanksgiving for any of us.
Compared to some of these, my solitary (horrible) meal at Denny’s wasn’t that bad.
When did Denny’s discover how to make eggs tasteless? They used to do a good breakfast. Should have gone to Waffle House.