Turkey Day Redux: Boobs, Birds, and Letting My Joy Out

As reported here on these electronic media Saturday, I safely traveled to and returned from the great state of Tennessee, and in case you didn't read it on Saturday, Tennessee truly is a great state. Minus Bruce Pearl. I kid, I kid. Sort of.

Anyway, I have much to tell, much to tell indeed! So, I've broken it up into compartmentalized story form. Because I'm lazy like that. And because otherwise the post would probably be really effing big if I didn't do that.

Diminished:
Let's start with the meal, shall we? Or, the rather spare offerings otherwise mistaken for "Thanksgiving Dinner." While my greatest hopes were achieved in that I could fall asleep in front of watch the Packers game Thursday at noon, I was getting hungry toward the end of the game. Fortunately, in the middle of the fourth quarter, when the game was pretty much finished, anyway, the dinner bell was rung.

I would have happily slept longer watched the rest of the game if it meant having more food.

Being the loving and caring father that I am, I stood up to get my kids their plates first. Knowing that they both love mashed potatoes (because, really, who doesn't love mashed potatoes?), I went straight for the potatoes, expecting to find some massive, heaping amount of deliciously boiled and creamily-whipped spuds. Instead, what I found was a meager pile of gunpowder spuds that had no pepper, no butter, no chives, no milk, no flavor and nothing really to make me think "mashed potatoes". And, considering there were 20 other people who would also want some potato flakes mashed potatoes, I served up a teaspoon of mashed potatoes for my child (I think I had Cookie's plate). Other "side" dishes suffered from a similar paucity. Again, small spoonfuls of everything was served up. With this, it was time to get to the meat of the meal--the meat! All morning, my wife's cousins and my brother-in-law had been manning the turkey fryer, so I was looking forward to some sumptuous turkey as well as the afore-promised Honey-Baked Ham.

Sadly, I got to the meat platters and found that the turkeys (well, the ones that were done, at least) had been carved with the delicacy and precision of an amphetamine-fueled axe-murderer. Picking through and getting some smaller portions that, you know, someone other than T. rex would eat, I turned to the ham.

Have I mentioned how much I love ham? This is a genetic thing, because my children both love ham, too. No, wait. There's no ham-loving gene. We love ham because it's so fucking delicious!!!

As I said to my wife later, when it was just the two of us: "Who the fuck serves a cold ham? We could have gone down the street to the grocer and gotten some cold cuts. Isn't the whole point of having a Honey-Baked Ham is that it is fucking baked???"

Mmmm...butchered bland turkey and cold ham. Two strikes and you're out, right?

I figured I could make up for the lack of everything else with rolls. Unfortunately, someone had planned ahead really well, and cooked 16 rolls. For 21 people. Like so many other aspects of the dinner, it could all be summed up fairly easily: Swing and a miss.

Fall on Me:
Around the "dinner" table, conversations were shared, but mostly about people I didn't know. Being that my wife and her siblings and her sister's husband all went to the same high school, they knew the same people. At one point, we were talking about running, and about how it's difficult for women to run (you know, 'cause they got boobs). Suddenly, the name Erin Hill was brought up (I think that's the name...I got distracted during the telling of the tale...as I will recount shortly).

Apparently, Ms. Erin literally hit herself in the face once during gym class. It was at this point that I took my wife's arm in my hands and said, "You have my attention. Do go on." Ms. Erin was not one to do things half-assed, from what I can gather, and when she went through puberty, she really went through puberty, erupting forth with lovely, heavy Double-E cup breasts on her somewhat slight frame.

My sister-in-law then informed everyone that Ms. Erin's large breasts caused her some troubles and really "screwed up her back". My mother-in-law then interjected that, no, her back got messed up when she was in a bus accident and they had to go in and do surgery.

The table fell silent for a moment and I added, just loud enough for everyone to hear, "Well, hell, they probably saved her life!"

Comedy: it's all in the timing.

King of Comedy:
My brother-in-law (my wife's brother), is perhaps the one person in the family most like me in terms of sense of humor (though my mother-in-law does have a very twisted sense of humor...she just feels bad about laughing at poop jokes and Carny folks). Many of my brother-in-law's friends rely strictly on shock value for their jokes. During the "meal", my BIL got a text message from his friend Marcello that my BIL had to read to the family: "Ha, Marcello says that he just clogged up his in-laws' toilet!"

"What the hell," I added to the end. "Doesn't he realize that you have to break up the fleet before jumping to hyperspace?"

People laughed, but as the words were finally sinking into my mother-in-law, she laughed the loudest and the hardest. So, I successfully offered up the two best lines of the entire weekend.

Stand:
One of the major problems of the entire holiday was that there were 21 people in the house and two dogs. This, in and of itself, should not have been a problem. However, it was a problem when the only seating is a loveseat, a recliner, a rickety rocking chair, two barstools and two other straight-backed chairs.

As such, I spent most of the holiday downstairs, in the basement, on the couch. I sat there. I read there. I worked on the laptop down there. I slept there. Pretty much, by the time Friday afternoon rolled around, I had worked a pretty good ass-groove into the couch. Awesome.

Orange Crush:
I didn't think it was possible to ruin French toast. I mean, it's pretty simple: soak it in an egg-and-milk mixture, sprinkled heavily with cinnamon and nutmeg, cook. Serve with syrup.

My sister-in-law, who enjoys nothing more than making others feel bad, brought a bunch of breakfast casseroles for Thursday and Friday. Thursday was a bunch of quiches, which were tolerable. I'm not a big egg fan, for reasons that I won't broach here (think biochemistry lab, if you must have some form of explanation), but the food was free and I could have a couple of slabs of it to tide me over for the rather sparse offerings for Thursday afternoon.

Friday was this French Toast Casserole thing. And, while I like French Toast, I don't like it with orange zest. Nor do I like it without cinnamon and nutmeg flavorings. I like it even less with caramel sundae sauce spread on top of it. However, since I was trying to be polite, I choked down my initial two pieces. With it, I ate a single piece of bacon and a single sausage patty. Talk about being made a sad panda...

Imagine my distress when my father-in-law loaded two more slabs of French Toast Casserole onto my plate. I suppose his heart was in the right place, but... Since I was severely lacking in the whole breakfast meat department, I went ahead and ate them. They laid in my stomach like rocks. Bland, chewy rocks. Bland, chewy, there's orange flavoring in here where citrus overtones should not be rocks.

Fortunately, I was able to steal a single sausage patty off the plate headed toward the dog's bowl before it got there.

Shiny Happy People:
My sister-in-law is a very religious person.

When, you know, she's not making fun of Mexicans.

I digress. My sister-in-law is a very religious person.

She has foisted the great love of Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Holy Spirit, Saint Wenceslas, the Holy Sepulcher and transubstantiation onto her oldest child. Well, it's both of her children, but her oldest seems to be the one who suffers has responded to it the most. Pretty much from the moment we got there until we left, it was one long, constant stream of things that are happening in her church. If it wasn't what was happening in the church, it was what her friend Lisa was doing...Lisa, whom she met at the church!

It came to the point where my wife and I are going to make a drinking game out of it the next time we're around her.

Possibly the most annoying thing (other than making her children say prayers when they are being punished...) was that, whenever one of the girls would be angry or frustrated or anything else that might be construed as negative in any way, my sister-in-law would command them to "Let your joy out."

Can't do a cartwheel? Let your joy out. Can't play with a toy because someone else is playing with it? Let your joy out. Not enough mashed potatoes on the buffet table? Joy, it's what's being let out.

So now I'm torn. I don't know what to do. If I'm ever told to "let my joy out", should I drop trou or just bust ass really loudly? I'm leaning toward the latter, and then sighing heavily and saying, "You're right, I do feel better." And then, if I can, to release a little trouser sneeze as a follow up and toss in "Oop, a little more joy for you all."

And then leave the room.

Sweetness Follows:
My fear about the pies was relieved a little bit when my mother-in-law showed up with four pies. That upped the pie:person ratio quite a bit. Unfortunately, there were now two pecan pies floating around the place.

This did not make me want to let my joy out.

However, there was enough pie for everyone. It was the, uh, getting of the pie that was most troublesome.

No one cut the pies.

Instead, I was handed a pie server and told to hack off a piece of whatever I wanted. I wish I was lying. It was so that you could sample all of the pies. Personally, I don't see why I couldn't just take a pie back to the corner that I was standing in (remember, seating was very limited) and just go to town.

My joy would have been released then.

Instead, there was a mad rush and a fight for the serving utensils. Pies were carved up in any manner which suited the last person at the pie pan. My OCD tendencies were not amused by this ignorance of proper pie protocol. Hysteria rocked the masses. The sun looked as though sackcloth had been drawn across it and the moon was the color of blood! A dragon with thirteen heads appeared! Lightning! Thunder! Office supplies! The Apocalypse!!!

I will say, though, that my wife's pie was the tastiest. So was the sweet potato/marshmallow cream pie that she made.