Thanksgiving Needs More Salt

When I was a kid, we celebrated the traditional family Thanksgiving - tons of food (lots of it home grown), an all day cooking marathon, a cool fall nip in the air, and football. Not all the best plays were in the football games:

• My mom would try to intercept my grandmother, who was intent on salting the daylights out of every dish. Nana would fake right, get a key block from a child-distraction (usually my little sister), then loft the saltshaker over the potatoes, turkey or whatever receiver was open at the time.
  
• My brother, Tom, made an end run around kitchen duties by discovering a sudden, latent interest in football. He would tiptoe into the living room, bury himself in the couch, and stare quietly at the television, hoping that his stillness would camouflage him. He would blend, forgotten, into the furniture, hoping to avoid being hauled into the culinary chaos. I would not be surprised to discover that he was still there.


• My younger sister would play ‘assistant coach' in the kitchen, messing up anything she touched, to the point Mom would shoo her off to play before she spilled any more hot gravy on the dogs or poured more cat food in the string beans. At the time I thought my sister was clueless. But now I’ve worked with adults who have perfected similar levels of incompetency. If you act like a child, continually botching projects, no one will expect you to do anything. I call it planned adolescence.


• My youngest brother guarded the temperamental oven with a fire extinguisher, in case it 'overheated,' a traditional Celtic term meaning house fire. I always wondered if its affinity to go up in flames was somehow related to excessive salt.
  
  My dad spent much of the day in the back forest cutting firewood. He would come in for a break to watch football a bit, then head back out. After a few minutes listening to our kitchen shenanigans, he quickly opted for the soothing sound of the chainsaw.
  
  Our kitchen was long, like a bowling alley. Just clearing the table involved lots of hiking back and forth. On Thanksgiving Day, when everyone was in there, including the pets, navigation was impossible. We were constantly tripping over a dog or a grandmother or both. My mom held her ground and her sanity with a bottomless glass of Gallo wine. I huddled in a corner and peeled potatoes, taking notes on a childhood that was sure to someday make me a famous writer. If I survived.
  
  Even the livestock knew something special was going on. We often fed leftovers to the horses, so through the miracle of conditioned response, whenever they caught sight of my brother with the fire extinguisher, they knew Mom was cooking and that leftovers were inevitable. Ever hear a horse whinny all day for potatoes and gravy? It’s not a pretty sound. They’d get so excited that the cows figured out something was up, and would start in as well-
  
  Midnight the cow: Moo! Moooooo!
  
  Cindy the cow: What’s up? Why all the mooing?
  
  Midnight the cow: Well, the horses are making a racket. Something about a saltshaker run amok up there in the house. Figured I’d join in.
  
  Cindy the cow: Gotcha…Moo! Mooo! …what’s a saltshaker?
  
  Sadly, there was so much noise inside the house, with my mother defending the cranberries from Nana the Crazed Saltress of Doom, and my sister shrieking that her Chatty Cathy dolly wanted to help salt things, too, that the din from our cheerleading cows was lost in the commotion.
  
  Perhaps this was why holiday tunes were invented – to blast them loudly so the neighbors couldn’t hear the real chaos going on inside the house. Perhaps that is why we lived so far out in the country, so neighbors weren’t within earshot.
  
  In any event, it was Thanksgiving, so eventually, after hours and hours of preparation, pandemonium, and excessive spicing, we all sat down in the dining room together, said Grace, and ate. For about fifteen minutes. By then we had run out of salt.

Thankful Not to Cook

At Thanksgiving my girlfriends fall into two distinct camps - those who cook and those who don't. The Cookers go into lavish detail about what they're making- how big it is, how fearsome it was, and how dead it now is. Then they stop to take a breath and wait for you to pin a medal on them for their efforts.

The Non-cookers are harder to ferret out. They're usually a bit quieter about their intentions- not cooking on Thanksgiving is well, unAmerican. Sure, the oinky guys pig out and watch football. But the women - isn't it a law somewhere that they have to put on an apron and a show? So the Non-cookers lie low, like guinea hens in the fallen leaves, hoping the Cookers won't notice them and cluck their disapproval.

Lately a few have come out of the culinary closet. This take the kind of guts not found in a Butterball. "I'm not cooking this year," one blurted out the other day. "I'm sick of it. I don't even like turkey. And I really don't like it trampled into my carpeting."

Some of us gave her a matched set of understanding glances. "I can't stand my relatives," another whispered. "I don't like having them in my house, judging my cooking and picking apart my life. Last year my nephew hid a drumstick in the recliner. For a month the whole place smelled like the dumpster behind KFC."

We nodded in agreement. "No kidding," another chimed in. "Why is it so bad not to cook? I work my tail off all week. I get a day off, I'm gonna slave away in the kitchen? Not. I'd like to lie on the couch all day, too. I'm gonna order a pizza. Who's with me?"

By now we could feel the icy stares of the Stepford Cookers upon us. Their barnyard chit chat had stopped.Through the haze of thickening gravy and stuffing recipes, they were sizing us up. Finally, though, we didn't care. We were tired, our self respect sucked out like so much gizzard drippings. They could tsk, tsk and pooh-pooh their hearts out - our wishbone had just snapped.

This year, I give thanks that I do not have to stick my hand up the butt of a frozen fowl. I give thanks that I will not stand on my feet all day to prepare a meal that will be consumed or condemned in half an hour. I give thanks that Uncle Bruno will not be here plugging our plumbing, and that my nephew won't be rummaging through my dresser drawer looking for 'fun buzzy toys.'

A true holiday is not a when or a where or a what. It's a who. The meal could be Cheetos and a Tab-get the right people there and bam!- Thanksgiving.

If you need me, I'll be on the couch pretending to watch the game. Really, though, I'll be revelling in the warm glow of my kids. If you don't need me, please join me.