Thanksgiving recovery

I am grateful that despite a number of issues with Thanksgiving that everyone in my family took each problem with even temper and did not feel the holiday was ruined.

It started in the morning, with my sister S calling me to let me know that she was running a few hours late. This wouldn't be a big deal, but it was just the first thing. She called a short while later to let me know that she was throwing up and she wasn't going to come. She thought she had eaten something bad. Normally, she would have been still encouraged to come, but because a similar assumption was made during my pregnancy with the bear cub where I almost lost her, we are all paranoid enough that we left it at that. Because of this I felt a little guilty and the the promise of making her plates of food doesn't exactly make up for it.

Next came the fact that my mom found she had left all sorts of things in Austin, including some of her medication, some of the ingredients, the recipe for oyster stuffing (something my other sister R and I consider a requirement for the Thanksgiving meal to feel complete), and other assorted items. Luckily R had not left Austin and was able to bring some of the items.

Almost three hours after we started the turkey, we started wondering why we weren't beginning to smell it. My mom checked the roaster and learned that it had never turned on. The outlet that we had plugged the roaster into is a GFCI outlet and it had somehow been switched off, so we turned it back on and continued with the meal. This actually resulted in more time to make the other items on the menu and for R to show up with the missing ingredients, but it resulted in our eating hamburgers and sweet potato fries for our normal 1 pm Thanksgiving meal. BTW, my husband is great at making burgers and I am grateful for the fact that he stepped in to make sure we all chose to eat instead of waiting the extra three hours for the turkey.

There were various other issues, such as the pregnant woman forgetting to cook the raw sweet potatoes in advance and resorting to nuking them in the microwave and the bread not being placed in the oven until the rest of the meal was actually on the table, but it was a wonderful holiday despite certain missing items and the obstacles we faced. We ended up having a wonderful turkey, oyster stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, and sweet potatoes. We also had rolls and pumpkin cheesecake for dessert a bit afterward.

I think in a lot of families all the things that came up would have resulted in a miserable day and horrible moods, especially with the hormonal pregnant woman snapping a few times over trivial things, but the holiday turned out wonderful, even if it was far from perfect.