Thanksgivings Past, Story #1

This is the story of the first and only time I hosted Thanksgiving at This Old House.

Setting:  2001.  We bought This Old House on October 15.  We hosted Thanksgiving the following month.

My husband is the seventh of eight children - yes, they are Catholic - and we expected to host four families - three of them his, and my parents.  We bought approximately $600 worth of food and alcohol, including a special order of Strawberry Uncrustables, a food item of which I had never heard in those pre-angel years.  Such a food order was quite a shock to me at the time, me who has only one sister. Welcome to the rest of my life!

Staying in our three-bedroom, one-shower house were my husband's brother L. and his wife L., his brother J. , wife J. and children S. and L., mother and father.  Oh, and us and Sybil the cat.  They arrived, for the most part, on Wednesday.  Wednesday night we planned to make lasagna for the crew.  We popped it in the oven around six and settled in for the night.

So we thought.

Around seven, we wondered why those damn lasagnas were taking so long.  Then we noticed the pilot light on the oven was out.  We tried to restart the oven to no avail.  Around eight-thirty, things got desperate. 

The oven was broken.  On the day before Thanksgiving.  Uncrustables were broken out.  I had a moment of extreme trauma.  We consulted our options.  Cancelling Thanksgiving:  Too  late.

Selling This Old House:  Not the day before Thanksgiving.

Laughing and getting drunk:  Not with children in the house.

So, Best Buy.

Fortunately, my father had driven his Ford F-150, complete with matching topper, down for the festivities.  We headed to Best Buy with scant resources while my husband's family broke into the alchohol supply.  My father-in-law started making ice cream treats with Creme de Menthe.

Best Buy didn't have a lot to offer in the under-$300 range.  We finally found one lone floor model twenty minutes before the store closed.

"Sorry, you can't buy the floor model," said the Stupid Salesperson.

My eyes rolled wildly in their sockets.  "Please," I hissed.  "You don't understand.  I have in-laws.  They have special needs."

"Special needs?" he inquired.

"They wanted Uncrustables," I said.  "Strawberry."

"Let me get my manager," he said, scurrying off.

They ended up selling us the floor model, even though it was missing a knob.  We loaded it into the truck with the help of three burly men headed out into the brisk November air.

When we arrived home, our old stove was sitting on the curb, a harbinger of appliances to come during our tenure in This Old House.  The dishwasher.  The hot water heater.  The furnace.  Ah, but those are stories for another day.

Fortunately, my father-in-law and one brother-in-law are quite handy in the ways of natural gas.  The carried the new stove in and hooked it up before you could say "Make me a bad alcoholic ice cream treat." 

It was about ten at night by the time we sat down to that lasagna.  Many were already full and hiccuping mint ice cream.  The wee children were sleeping on the floor of the guest room that would become the little angel's lair.

We had to buy more liquor the next day.  But dammit, we had Thanksgiving.

Amen.