Thanksgiving 2010

I am student teaching this year and was thrilled when I saw my school had Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off this year. Five glorious days of no lesson plans. Looking back now I think that teaching might have been okay. My Thanksgiving Break has been blur of excitement, chaos, and a bit of disaster thrown in to keep us on our toes, maybe off of them now that I think of it.

I got home from school on Tuesday full of anticipation. My mom had volunteered my house for Thanksgiving this year. True I have a dining room now, but my house is a bit on the small side. It was just my family, my brother's family and my Grandma so I thought it was manageable.

Well, then I found out that my Aunt and Uncle were going to be her. Okay, two more people, I think I can still manage, they volunteered to bring Apple Pie and Sweet Potatoes. Less work for me! Then when my brother was over baking pies for Thanksgiving my cousin from Chicago called to say he and his wife would be in the area. Could they stop by? Of course I said yes, I haven't seen them in years.

Oh, I need to back up a bit, back to Tuesday. Two hours after I got home from teaching I started to get sick. Not just a little cold, I had aches, a head ache, sore throat, sneezing and coughing. Of course I would wait until I was off of school to get sick. I managed to be social when my brother was over baking, but then I crawled into a box and hid from the world. When the kids went to bed that night I too went to bed hoping that I would be better for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving Day is the day we eat with my husbands family. I was miserable. I decided not to go to dinner, not wanting to get anyone else sick. My husband offered to bring me a plate of leftovers and I crawled back into bed. When I woke up, they had just come back, but they forgot the leftovers. So no turkey for me on Thanksgiving.

Friday I woke up feeling much better. This was the day the family descended on my house for our Thanksgiving dinner. It has been a long tradition to have a Friday Thanksgiving to help families not have to fit two dinners into one day. The house was almost ready and I ventured out to the store to get the ingredients for the dishes I was making. It is much easier grocery shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. All the crowds are in the Malls or Department stores and the grocery store is nice and quiet.

My husband was grumpy, how dare I get "shmoed" into hosting Thanksgiving. What was I thinking? Then he found out I was cooking food and he went ballistic. I don't know why it didn't occur to him that I was cooking. I told him what I was making Brussels Sprouts and Oyster Stuffing. Did he think they were just going to materialize at the table? So I am dealing with Grumpy and I trying not to get mad. I know he is looking for an excise to leave the house, like he does before any party we have. That way he doesn't have to do any final prep work. He will deny it, but we have had four events at the new house and he has waled out of the prep work for three of them.

People start to arrive and I am still cooking. My cousins from out of town actually come at the time they are told, unlike the rest of my family who will come an hour later. So of course I am still cooking. I turn the oven on to keep my Brussels Sprouts with Apples warm and soon smoke starts filing the house. The pies that my brother made overflowed and there was ick on the bottom of my stove that was burning. It was bad, people had to leave the house.

Somehow I managed to get it all done just in time for dinner. My Father and Grandmother got into the house, they have a hard time walking and going up stairs. We managed to get enough chairs and table space in the house. Dinner was served. I did have to make more rolls mid meal and we ran out of dark meat, of course because that is my favorite. We started to chat and laugh and then there was a knock at the front door.

We all were there and I never use the front door. We all stopped talking (if yo knew my family that alone is an accomplishment) and I got up to open the door. I was surprised to find another cousin, his wife and baby daughter at my door. They had come all the way from Pennsylvania and surprised us all. His parents were with us and they too had no idea that they were coming. Grandma would be able to meet her great grand-daughter finally.

The whole meal and conversation afterwards took less than five hours. A new generation of cousins met and played together for the first time. My daughter and my cousins daughter discovered a tickling game and that entertained them for quite a long time while the grown ups caught up with each other. Then just a suddenly as it began the house was empty once again. I had survived hosting my first Thanksgiving Dinner.

I went to bed that night exhausted and announced that I would be sleeping in the next morning. I love when I can sleep in and since my husband was home I knew I could. It was a nice calm relaxing night and then in the morning the phone rang. I looked at caller ID and saw it was mom. I assumed she was arranging to pick up the TV tables and chairs that she had brought over. I was wrong!

She was frantic and I knew something bad had happened. My father had fallen in the kitchen and probably broke his leg. She needed someone to come over to help them. I ran down stairs and dragged my husband out of the shower. I knew he would be able to help pick my father up. He quickly got dressed and got over to my parents house.

It was more than the two could safely do. They ended up calling 911. My mom said it was like a parade of fire fighters, paramedics, and police in the house. She stopped counting at twelve. They took him to the VA hospital and my husband came home.

It turns out that my dad fell and twisted his leg under him as he fell. He broke both bones below the knee and one of the breaks is five inches long diagonally across the bone length wise. He will be in the hospital for at least 10 days and as of right now he might need surgery to hold the bones together.

That night we set up our Christmas Tree and the children decorated it. We topped it with a santa hat and reminisced about our blur of a holiday. Everyone says they are looking forward to me hosting it again next year. I just hope that we all stay in once piece next year.