A Thanksgiving to Remember

By Allan Olson

Holidays are always remembered differently by everyone, and the memories created – good or bad – usually last a lifetime.

This Thanksgiving holiday was truly one to remember for us.

For starters, it was our first Thanksgiving in our new home, a house that had room for everyone to sleep, without laying on top of each other. It had room for the kids to play without feeling like they were going to run us over (although sometimes we still wondered if they would), and best of all, we had room for everyone to eat in one room.

On Wednesday, the day prior to the big feast, the oven was hard at work making pumpkin pies, cherry pies, apple pies and in the off time it needed to be cleaned, so we let our hands rest and let the oven do its magical self-cleaning.

At about 6 p.m. I started my “world-famous” caramel rolls, with the aid of a couple nieces who were up for the holiday weekend. Largely, I made them do the work; I just supervised. I made the caramel and took care of the actual baking of the rolls. After several pans had gone through, some caramel spilled over, smoking up the oven on the hot surface. The rolls were finally done about five hours later.

Since we had at least one more pie to make, along with a large turkey and some buns to bake on Thursday, we decided to let the oven do its magical work one more time and hit the self-clean button for the second time that day and went to bed.

Thursday morning came along and the “pro” cooks in the house decided it was time to get the turkey ready for the oven. A short time later, “the” pro cook in charge (aka the mother-in-law) decided to check on the progress of the turkey. “What’s wrong with your oven?” she asked. After examining the oven, we tried the old standby: unplug it and see if it works. Left unplugged for approximately 20 minutes, we turned everything back on and discovered it still wouldn’t heat up.

Plan B: we discussed whether we should buy a roaster. Then I brought up the idea of the deep-fryer we hadn’t used in a couple of years. Ultimately, that was the option that was chosen. Off to town for peanut oil (good thing some stores were open on Turkey Day, or we wouldn’t have had any turkey), while a couple of us tackled the cleaning of the deep fryer that was out in cold storage.

Now we were taking a gamble on that as well since, to the best of my knowledge, nobody bothered to check the fryer to see if it actually still worked before we dumped the oil in. Miraculously, we still had the instruction booklets for it – in both English and Spanish!

Fortunately, the fryer worked, and we were all ready to eat only an hour later than we originally had planned.

Now if that was all that went wrong that day, it would’ve been a perfect day.

Fast-forward a few hours to approaching midnight, when many of our guests (and my wife) ventured off to do some midnight Black Friday shopping in the madness of town. I refrained, wisely I thought, for the easy job of staying home with the kids, with them either already in bed or ready for it.

It couldn’t have been 20 minutes after everyone left. I was sleeping, and I allowed the girls to watch the TV and sleep in the bedroom with me. I awoke to the sound of Abigail running for the bathroom. That can’t be good, I thought. I was right – it wasn’t. I was stuck cleaning up a mess that I dislike the most, and worst of all, it was in my bed.

After about 30 minutes of cleaning, I was finally back in bed. Now Abigail had a bucket near her; she had made a couple more runs to the bathroom, but my bed was safe.

The shoppers came home at some point during the night and started played cards. Marcus woke up, and this time it was my wife who ended up with a turn at cleaning up the mess from a youngster who probably ate too much.

So Thanksgiving Day, while not a disaster and still loads of fun, was definitely one to remember. Nobody else got sick, and hopefully it stays that way. The remainder of the weekend was spent playing games, grazing on leftovers and napping. In all, it was still a fun weekend. Best of all, I only went to town once, and by the time I got there the stores were largely quiet (and least compared to the stories I heard about the early a.m. Friday lines.)