Thanksgiving

For some obscure reason, my father's favorite holiday was Thanksgiving. One year, he invited all of both his and my mother's relatives who lived within a two hour's drive. That was a shitload of people, maybe 40 or so.

Mom, of course, was less than amused at having to ramrod the feeding of the extended tribe. Mom's stove was the traditional electric 1960s one with four burners and an oven. She didn't have a "radarange," as microwave ovens were called, back then. I wasn't exactly a lot of help, since my cooking talents stubbornly remained about at the level of being able to set fire to anything I tried to cook, including hardboiled eggs.

It was a madhouse. There was a fireplace in the dining room and the living room, for it was an old house. The chandelier in the dining room was a wrought-iron affair with a dozen candles. Dad built roaring fires in both fireplaces and, of course, the candles were lit. There were two tables in the living room, a "kiddie table," with both the children and their parents, and a "teen table."

One of my cousins, who was about four, was running around the house, raising Cain. The cousin who was his mother was oblivious. My mom finally yelled out "will someone do something about [name deleted]?" I grabbed him as he ran by me and hoisted him up by the front of his shirt so he was level with me. I snarled in his face "siddown and shaddup or die!" He was pretty quiet after that. When he started to act up, all I had to do was glare at him and he quieted right back down. My grandmother was her usual cheery self, sighing and saying "I wish I was dead," which was her typical proclamation at any sort of festivities.

As the meal progressed, having two fires burning and 40 people eating turned out to not be the wisest idea, as the temperature of the rooms began approaching that of a sauna. It was a cold afternoon, snow was lightly falling, and we had to open the windows to cool the place down.

It was a delightful meal. There wasn't much fighting. One cousin kvetched that, because she had had another baby, that she was going to be sitting at the kiddie table for another six years. There was more than enough food to go around, and everyone had a pretty good time. After dinner, we (the older kids) cleared the table of the dinner dishes and then served coffee and dessert, which was three kinds of pie. A few of the adults were smoking cigarettes.

And then the chandelier fell down.

Happy Thanksgiving!