Exactly.
Tomorrow, my daughter and I will travel to Oklahoma City to spend Thanksgiving with my younger sister and her family. My sister and I are very close, and I believe the reason for that is when we were younger we tried to kill each other. And no, that's not me being metaphorical. At least two or three times in childhood we actually tried to kill each other. But since we mostly got our ideas about how to kill each other from cartoons, and since anvils and actual sticks of dynamite were not easy for kids to get their hands on (even in Texas), our plans never worked out, and so we mostly just argued and bickered and hated each other's guts, as only siblings can.
Now she's one of my favorite people, and what we have in common is that we both managed to survive our childhoods - including the Family Gatherings. I deliberately capitalized "Family Gatherings," in the same way I would capitalize "The Troubles," or "The Depression," or "The Spanish Inquisition." Because if you could historically combine all of those events, and put them through a sausage grinder, what you'd get would be a typical Thanksgiving from my childhood.
My Aunt Lillian had a ranch in Marble Falls, Texas, and it was a favorite gathering spot for holidays. The kitchen was large enough to accommodate the many Patrick and Rutland women who loved to cook and bake, though several of them had far more passion than skill. And some of them were experimental in the way that Nazi scientists probably were during the war. I swear to God one year one of my aunts made something she called an Idiot Salad, meaning it was so simple that any idiot could make it. It was green. Not salad green. Chernobyl green. There may have been jello involved, and I know for a fact that marshmallows were in there. In a SALAD. I thought she named it that because only an idiot would
eat it. Or perhaps a drunk uncle, of which there were several. (I just went and Googled "idiot salad," and have discovered several recipes. The common denominator seems to be that, in order to be an Idiot Salad, it must contain
no food that actually exists in nature. Recipes like this will almost certainly usher in the End Times. Please stop cooking FOR the Apocalypse, guys.)
Nowadays, my little sis and I are about creating new traditions. The first new tradition is called "Fucking Relax And Have A Glass Of Wine Already," which is kind of long but very specific. The way it works is, when I see my sister starting to get a little manic in the kitchen, because the turkey isn't browning just so, or we're two and a half minutes late getting the stuffing in the oven, my job is to pour a glass of her favorite red, hand it to her and say, "Fucking relax and have a glass of wine already." We agree this is a wonderful tradition, and we practice it as often as we can. Everybody wins. This runs hard on the heels of another new tradition, mostly for me, called "Will You And Your Scotch Please Get Out Of My Fucking Kitchen?!?" Again, win-win.
Last year at Christmas we started playing dominoes. I thought I would hate it, but it has quickly become one of my favorite holiday experiences. To watch my ten year-old daughter and my mother (who is quite a bit older than ten) go head-to-head, and to listen to them trash-talking each other, cracks me up as few things can. Last year I sprayed a mouthful of perfectly good 12 year single malt all over the table because, in the middle of a game in which my mom was actually winning, she actually started talking shit to her own granddaughter. We play a version called
Mexican Train Dominoes, which is pretty easy to learn but has a definite strategy of fucking each other over as often as possible - making it, really, the perfect family-time game. (The first time I heard the phrase
Mexican Train, I was thinking of something very,
very different. Nevermind.)
I never used to look forward to family gatherings. Maybe it's because I'm less uptight than I used to be. Maybe it's because my personal life isn't great right now, and I simply need to be around family, because at least it's familiar. Or maybe it's because the torch has passed, and now it's up to my sister and me to set the tone for the holidays, which we do by remembering what the Family Gatherings used to be like, and not doing any of that. All I know is, I'm really looking forward to this week.
I'm taking the laptop, by the way. Because some funny shit is almost certainly going to go down, and I will post it as quickly as I can. Promise me you'll post your funny shit in the Comments section, because dysfunction is more awesome when we share. Gobble Gobble, Motherfuckers.
LB
