The Thanksgiving we didn't eat

It wasn't for any of the reasons you might be guessing--we spent our day feeding the homeless, we were penniless, we were dieting, we were stuck in an airport, we were making a "statement," we just skipped it.

Nope.

Seven years ago--long before we hit Florida and became saner--we decided (oh, okay, Bill decided) that it would be fun to cater Thanksgiving dinner, without a license, for a family we didn't know, who had posted an ad on Craigslist. 

There’s so much wrong with this concept that I won’t even start.

We had, I think, been watching way too much Food Network and figured: We can do that!

A young husband had posted an ad.  Seems that Mike had tired of doing all the cooking and serving every Thanksgiving, and never getting to relax and enjoy the day. He and his wife, a lawyer, had a nice, upscale home in the New Hampshire suburbs, two kids, and a family of 25 who descended on them every year. The only caveats were that his dad was lactose intolerant and Aunt Susan was going to bring her famous desserts.

We agreed, and the planning began.

Bill was in heaven! He started digging up recipes weeks in advance.  

We printed out a menu for the family's approval, to put at everyone's place at the table. Every bit of it but the rolls was from scratch. It looked like this, decked out with fall leaves, ears of corn, and fancy fonts:

APPETIZERS
Crudités
Roasted red pepper & sun-dried tomato dipping sauce
Basil aioli dipping sauce
Mixed greens with Parmesan vinaigrette
Crab bisque or Cioppino
Dinner rolls
Southern dill-cheese bread

THANKSGIVING DINNER
Roast turkey
Fresh whole-cranberry sauce
Portobello mushroom gravy (one with and one without mushrooms)
Traditional sage dressing
Cornbread dressing
Garlic mashed potatoes
Southwest-style chipotle smashed sweet potatoes
Green bean casserole with panko-breaded onion topping
Oven-roasted stuffed onions
Oven-roasted carrots, squash, broccoli, & asparagus

Champagne sorbet (to cleanse the palate)

DESSERT
Italian love cake, a rich ricotta delight
Granny Smith apple pie with caramel drizzle
Mike's own pumpkin pie
Aunt Susan's lemon cake
Aunt Susan's chocolate cake

The young family was delighted! Never before had they seen such a menu, let alone at their very own house for Thanksgiving, with caterers doing the service and cleanup!

We had no friggin’ idea what we'd gotten ourselves into.

I spent the week before Thanksgiving nagging Bill to make sure he had everything organized. I made spreadsheets, timetables, strategies. He borrowed chafing dishes, pans, and crock pots from the American Legion and every friend we had.

The shopping alone took two hours and cost over $200.

We spent 17 hours chopping, preparing, and precooking. The dog and cat ran around crazy. Friends came to watch for a while and left, shaking their heads. I never worked so hard in my life. We drank heavily. We came close to blows.

Then, on Thanksgiving morning, bleary eyed and hung over, we loaded it all, most of it fully cooked, into every available inch of my compact car and hit the road, praying that nothing would slide leeward and spill all over everything else.

You know how your house smells on Thanksgiving? My car smelled like that for weeks afterward.

We pulled up and started unloading, carrying everything upstairs from the garage to their kitchen. 

Mike helped, though he had clearly had wine glass in hand for quite some time.

Some of the guests were already there, curious about us and already getting under foot.

Anyway, we got all the stuff piled up on counters, in an alien kitchen with, of all things, gas burners, God help us.

Mike's wife seemed to have no recollection of where any of her pots and pans were kept. (Why should she, being a lawyer and all?) 

Children ran about, shrieking. 

It looked like a very bad Food Network Challenge that wouldn't end well, and the worst part was, we were in it.

Somehow, we managed to get everything sorted out and warming up. We laid out the appetizers to keep the milling throng at bay. 

One old lady asked, "What's low sodium here?" Instead of laughing in her face, I calmly consulted the sheaf of recipes we'd printed out for just such a situation. Well, nothing was really low sodium, but I fibbed to her that one of the dips and one of the soups weren't too, too bad.  (Thank God there were no vegans in the house.)  

Everyone was seated at a couple of makeshift tables in the dining room, and it wasn't a buffet.  So we began serving soups and plates of food to order.

It was wild.  I almost lost it when one woman darted into the kitchen to tell me her husband needed a napkin. I very nearly said, "Let him get his own flippin' napkin, lady! We've got a dinner to put on here!" 

I restrained myself.

It all worked, somehow perfectly. Everyone raved and applauded. 

The aunts got tiddly on the champagne sorbet. The wife angsted about whether the children should have any. I figured there was no danger, since the kids were so high on sugar anyway that a little alcohol could only help.

My favorite person of the whole day was a large adolescent lad who kept exclaiming, "This is the best food I've ever had!"

My second favorite person of the whole day was a five-year-old boy who insisted on helping clean up.

Did I mention that we signed up for cleanup, too? 

Picture a five-course dinner for 30, one small dishwasher, a tiny sink, a wife who has no idea where her storage containers are nor, once found, where their matching lids might be, and two exhausted chef-waiters-turned-dishwashers.

At one point, I wasn't none too neat about how I shoved leftovers into the fridge. Lidless containers, bulging with moist ingredients and covered only in plastic wrap, teetered atop other lidless containers in the same condition. 

I just didn’t care any more.

At the end of the day, we made all of $150 profit. Mike was very good to us, considering we underestimated how much the whole thing would cost.

Of course they kept all the leftovers, and the help got none, because the family had paid for it all.

The next year, Mike begged us to come back and do it all over again.

We did not.

Every Thanksgiving since has seemed like a breeze in comparison.

Island colors

About 2 percent of Port Charlotte’s population of nearly a thousand souls is of Caribbean origin. 

The area has four Caribbean restaurants serving up curry goat, oxtail, jubilee, callaloo, saltfish, and ackee. 

One needn’t even set foot in Jamaica to hear a variety of lilting voices and see splashes of color as riotous as its flag’s. And we don't have goats and stray dogs wandering into the road.

Within the space of 2 square miles, for instance, are three remarkable examples.

~~~~~

Jamaican women younger than 60 walk like priestesses, their heads, sometimes turbaned, balanced high upon straight spines, as if carrying baskets of mangoes.  They seem to march to a dignified internal reggae parade.

There’s one such woman in the neighborhood, an unfailingly cheerful young lady. 

“It’s a beautiful day! Yes!” she’ll sing out as she passes.

Daily, she walks her dogs—one, a wayward, lunging pit bull, the other a lazy cur—as if marching in such a parade, dogs attached to one outflung arm, poop bag to the other.

Her brightly patterned skirts swirl around her ankles. Her dark hair is adorned with hanging dreadlocks the color of dried earth.  One morning, she appeared to be wearing a stuffed cat atop her head, its paws and tail bobbing merrily as she strode along.

On closer examination, it was a new patch of dreadlocks that she’d thought to weave overnight.

I wonder what she must do for a living.

Hairdressing?

~~~~~

One island family has two middle-school children, whom I see walking to the bus stop.

They are even more polite and pleasant than other local children. Part of the reason might be a strict upbringing. Their father sometimes shadows them to the bus stop in a vast white Cadillac and sits there grimly until the bus arrives.

Christ. Middle school is hard enough.

One day, the girl was cradling a small shoebox in her arms. I figured it was goodies for her class.  But she opened the box and showed me what she explained was her egg.  It was, indeed, a hard-boiled egg, painted with a little face, swaddled in kerchiefs. She and all of her classmates had been protecting one all week, to learn what infant care was like.

She appeared ready to pitch it in the street at that point.

Her brother, even more pleasant than she is, once shocked a neighboring mom.

She was treating her sons to Dairy Queen and asked what he would like.

“I don't know. I’ve never had Dairy Queen!” he replied.

“The poor child!” she told me. “His father is so strict. Imagine! Never had Dairy Queen. I got him an Oreo Cookies Blizzard, and you’d think I gave him a million bucks.”

~~~~~

Jamaican women older than 60 tend to shuffle about in small bands, usually heading to church, as one. Sometimes they travel door to door, carrying umbrellas against the sun and handing out religious tracts--which, if one reads them carefully, warn of intellectuals, Catholics, and other evils.

This tends to make a smart Catholic person a bit twitchy, but never mind. They seem like perfectly sweet old ladies.

Such a group--also unfailingly cheerful and dressed in clashing patterned skirts and blouses--lives together in what I call “the Pepto-Bismol House.” Not because of their need to dose themselves with it, though that might be a consideration in the islands. Rather, because of its appalling color, somewhere between Pepto and black raspberry ice cream.

I assume there are no men living there. None would stand for that paint job, and they would’ve been outlived anyway.

I wonder what their quiet next-door neighbor makes of this. His house is impeccably white, with crisp black shutters and a white Buddha out front.

On the other hand, giving directions to his place must be easy. Next to the Pepto-Bismol House. With a Buddha. You can’t miss it.