Top Ten Things I'll Miss About Thanksgiving with the Joneses

I’m completely apathetic about work today. I’m supposed to meet a deadline and I’m extremely behind. Instead of explaining the intricacies of the predicament I’m in, I’ll use a sports analogy. Today is game day and I’ve got a center fielder, catcher, short stop and a DH. That's all. The rest of the team is conspicuously missing, and I’ve got a GM breathing down my neck.

Peanuts, get your peanuts here!

Instead of rectifying the situation, I will take a bad situation and make it worse. Work? Nah. Time to blog.

Next week is Thanksgiving, and for the first time in my life I will not be spending the holiday with my family. This year I’ll be in LA for turkey day and I just realized the Top Ten Things I Will Miss about Thanksgiving with the Joneses:

10.) Great Aunt Bessie. This is not a joke. I really have an Aunt Bessie who is roughly a million years old. Aunt Bess is suffering from the effects of time, what doctors call dementia. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a loved one suffer from dementia. On a daily basis it’s pretty awful, but throw a nice tablecloth down, a giant bird full of tryptophan and a few glasses of pinot noir, and it’s incredibly entertaining.

9.) Hors d'oeuvres. My family loves the hors. We usually have about 7 trays of various hors d'oeuvres before dinner--and there are only 7 of us there. You do the math. It’s actually kinda sick. I consistently fill up on pigs-in-a-blanket though I insist I hate hot dogs. Maybe I’m suffering from dementia. I’ll miss the gluttonous buffet of hors d'oeuvres. This year I’ve traded them in for: There’s some HORS in this house!

8.) Uncle David Hits the Bottle. Thanksgiving is a day for my Uncle David to let loose. Of course, he works at Sears, and since Black Friday is one of the biggest shopping days of the year, he has to get up early for work on Friday. So Uncle David gets drunk early. At 12:30 in the afternoon you can expect Uncle D to be on his 4th gin & tonic and real happy to see you. By 4:30 he’s saying real weird shit and asking you to accompany him outside while he chain smokes 4 cigarettes and you glare through the window wishing you were talking to Aunt Bessie about how much she hates black people.

7.) Ping Pong. It is a Thanksgiving tradition to play ping pong in the basement. Despite the fact that we’ve all been playing for many, many years, we all stink. We’re awful. If we get more than three hits in succession, it’s as if Wimbledon has erupted downstairs. This year I had hoped to incorporate some Maria Sharapova grunts into my sets, ah well. Maybe next year.

6.) Where’s Jigs? Uncle Jimmy?!! For every Thanksgiving I can recall, my father has inquired, “Where’s Jigs?” Jigs was my Aunts’ dog who died before I was even born. The math doesn’t even make sense but my Dad finds it wildly hilarious and my Aunt finds it annoying. The same scenario goes for Uncle Jimmy who died about 19 years ago. Without question, right before grace my Father will exclaim with feigned worry in his voice, “Where’s Uncle Jimmy?!!” The reaction he wants always follows: Aunt Bess gets confused because she thinks Uncle Jimmy may really be hiding in the basement, my other Aunt gets annoyed at my Dad, the children giggle, my granny exclaims, “OH, you’re awful!!!!,” and my Mother gives that disapproving Russell, you’re an asshole (but I really think you’re funny) look.

(a)At the mention of grace I realized that a part of me will miss the traditional: “Rub a dub dub, thanks for the grub!” that my Dad will try to pass off as a sensible “Grace.”

5.) The gross factor. My other aunt has a knack for blurting out grotesque statements at the dinner table. These statements usually involves the workings of her digestive system, or my Aunt Bessie’s digestive system. The last time I had lunch with her, just as I was about to bite into my spinach salad, she told me “I can’t eat that stuff. Lettuce gives me the runs."


4) Get a job! This is not necessarily Thanksgiving specific. Every time we are all around a dinner table, my Father tells my 95 year old dementia-suffering Aunt to, “Get a job!”

3.) You want some hot gravy? A schism exists in my family which divides us to the very core. One (sane) faction enjoys their gravy piping hot--the other (obviously insane) faction prefers cool gravy. Have you ever seen cold gravy? Its gelatinous meat flavored pudding. Actually—strike that. I won’t miss the gravy.

2.) Dessert is an extension of the hors d’oeuvres tradition for the Joneses. 7 people=4 pies. Aunt Bess gets her own mince meat pie. Have you ever seen mince meat pie? It looks like a can of Alpo dog food scooped into a Betty Crocker pre-made crust. Aunt Bess can keep her pie. So that leaves 6 people for 3 pies: Apple, Pumpkin & Lemon Meringue. All homemade--all delicious. That is… until my Aunt with said exclaimed digestion problems uses her fat fingers to scoop out the slices. “Better Leverage,” she says with her finger in her mouth before she dives in to serve another piece. Mmmm, apple pie & backwash.

1.) The car ride home. This is legendary. It’s like scenes from a dysfunctional (loving) family. Exclamations like “Jerry, I don’t care if she’s family—your cousin is a total asshole!!!!” can be heard for miles. Flatulence. There’s lots of flatulence being released in the car (mostly from my Father and my grandmother). Granny is more of a ‘silent but deadly’ kinda gal. But Dad, well, he enables the window lock so we can’t get fresh air, and laughs maniacally all the way home.