- Announce that you would like to start a new family tradition, and proceed to take off your clothes at the dinner table.
- Open the oven, shove hunks of Velveeta cheese into the turkey while it cooks. Tell mom it adds the coolest flavor.
- Shoot olive pits at Grandpa’s glasses. (Just pinch them in your fingers and they FLY!!)
- Whenever someone at the table says a word beginning with the letter R, make a loud “BUZZ”ing noise.
- Suck your cranberry sauce loudly through a straw.
- Bring a date that only talks about her/his spouse at home.
- Hold your nose while you eat.
- Announce that you’ve got a new fear of choking.
- When you arrive, promise that your date won’t be more than an hour late, he/she just has to wait for the warden to get together all the necessary release forms, and then they are free to go.
Tag Archives: Thanksgiving
I Am Thankful
Martha Stewart will not be dining with us this Thanksgiving. I’m telling you in advance, so don’t act surprised. Since Ms. Stewart won’t be coming, I’ve made a few small changes:
- Our sidewalk will not be lined with homemade, paper bag luminaries. After a trial run, it was decided that no matter how cleverly done, rows of flaming lunch sacks do not have the desired welcoming effect.
- Once inside, our guests will note that the entry hall is not decorated with the swags of Indian corn and fall foliage I had planned to make. Instead, I’ve gotten the kids involved in the decorating by having them track in colorful autumn leaves from the front yard. The mud was their idea.
- The dining table will not be covered with expensive linens, fancy china, or crystal goblets. If possible, we will use dishes that match and everyone will get a fork.
- Since this IS Thanksgiving, we will refrain from using the plastic Peter Rabbit plate and the Santa napkins from last Christmas.
- Our centerpiece will not be the tower of fresh fruit and flowers that I promised. Instead we will be displaying a hedgehog-like decoration hand-crafted from the finest construction paper. The artist assures me it is a turkey.
- We will be dining fashionably late. The children will entertain you while you wait. I’m sure they will be happy to share every choice comment I have made regarding Thanksgiving, pilgrims and the turkey hotline. Please remember that most of these comments were made at 5:00 a.m. upon discovering that the turkey was still hard enough to cut diamonds.
- As accompaniment to the children’s recital, I will play a recording of tribal drumming. If the children should mention that I don’t own a recording of tribal drumming, or that tribal drumming sounds suspiciously like a frozen turkey in a clothes dryer, ignore them. They are lying.
- We toyed with the idea of ringing a dainty silver bell to announce the start of our feast. In the end, we chose to keep our traditional method. We’ve also decided against a formal seating arrangement. When the smoke alarm sounds, please gather around the table and sit where you like.
- In the spirit of harmony, we will ask the children to sit at a separate table. In a separate room. Next door.
- Now, I know you have all seen pictures of one person carving a turkey in front of a crowd of appreciative onlookers. This will not be happening at our dinner. For safety reasons, the turkey will be carved in a private ceremony. I stress “private” meaning: Do not, under any circumstances, enter the kitchen to laugh at me. Do not send small, unsuspecting children to check on my progress. I have an electric knife. The turkey is unarmed. It stands to reason that I will eventually win. When I do, we will eat.
- I would like to take this opportunity to remind my young diners that “passing the rolls” is not a football play. Nor is it a request to bean your sister in the head with warm tasty bread.
- Oh, and one reminder for the adults: For the duration of the meal, and especially while in the presence of young diners, we will refer to the giblet gravy by its lesser-known name: Cheese Sauce. If a young diner questions you regarding the origins or type of Cheese Sauce, plead ignorance. Cheese Sauce stains.
- Before I forget, there is one last change. Instead of offering a choice between 12 different scrumptious desserts, we will be serving the traditional pumpkin pie, garnished with whipped cream and small fingerprints. You will still have a choice; take it or leave it.
Martha Stewart will not be dining with us this Thanksgiving. She probably won’t come next year either.
I am thankful.
Signs You’re Going To Have A Dysfunctional, White-Trash Family Thanksgiving
by H. Kent Craig
- Little sister Sue catches Mama adding a box of Ex-Lax to her special brown gravy to insure that everyone will “be regular” afterwards.
- Cousin Jen shows up wearing her new mink stole that has a blaze-orange circle-and-slash painted on the back of it, and proudly displays her summons for her court date to answer for beating the crap out of the animal rights activists who ruined her new coat.
- Brother Bobby, who just flew in for Thanksgiving from some unnamed South American country, keeps popping up like a jack-in-the-box and fiddling with his “piece” in a low-profile belt holster while nervously spying from the kitchen bay window up and down the street with binoculars.
- Cousin Mikey shows up with his new bride, his three-quarters sister Julie, who is his sister by his father and his oldest full sister.
- Uncle Max coughs and sputters up in his rusty old pickup, and asks those attending if anyone has a fresh pouch of “Redman” chewing tobacco that he can shove down into the transmission to keep it from leaking all the fluid out until he can make back home.
- Aunt Carly shows up with Carole, who is her new “best friend” as well as being her current parole officer and live-in lesbian lover and Domme who is also an associate producer on The Jerry Springer Show.
- Second-cousin Billy Joe brings as his guest his current analyst, who’s doing his doctoral thesis in primitive societal familial subcultures.
- Uncle Peter, who’s legally blind but can see some shapes and colors and shadows, and who also got legally blind fucking stone drunk before ever showing up with his wife Aunt Millie, keeps “accidentally” nearly falling into all the women and copping feels as he seeks to regain his balance.
- 13-year-old cousin Timmy asks his Uncle Bobby if he can borrow his thermal-melt scale device, so he can check the purity of an eight-ball “rock” he just bought from your Dad.
- Uncle Ralph serves the turkey flambe’ by pouring some his famous homemade ‘shine all over it and igniting it with a flick from his unfiltered Camel cigarette, creating a ball of flame that alights what hair is left on Uncle Peter’s head and gives third-degree burns to his balding pate, filling the dining room with the stench of roasting human as well as turkey flesh, as 911 is called for the second time on this special Thanskgiving holiday.