Happy Thanksgiving! And....

...it's even happier because THE DRESSING TURNED OUT TO BE DELICIOUS! I am so relieved. Many compliments came my way for the sausage/cornbread and cranberry/walnut combinations, with additional kudos offered from my Uncle Mike and Poppy, both of whom enjoyed the oyster dressing, which, eewwwww. They were both very sweet, but I'm still of the mind that they should have offered me a medal, because I did have to cut those slimy, ugly things up.


We went to Pat and Angie's house along with Kieren, Dayden and Kiersi, my parents, my Uncle Mike and Aunt Jackie, Mary Elizabeth, my step-gran, her son Doug (who is my....step-uncle? Very confusing), Angie's aunt and uncle, Debbie and Steve (who are our age) and my young cousin Emily, who was introducing a serious new beau to the family, Manny.


I went over to meet him and took the girls with me. Manny looked at me shyly in the manner of a person who is not a natural extrovert being plopped down in the middle of a family that contains just two kinds of people: Extreme extroverts who will try to be your best friend within ten minutes of meeting you and extreme introverts who will sit and look out the window....at the television....at a picture hanging on the wall....at a speck of dust on a tabletop....ANYTHING other than talk to you so that the silences stretch out like rubber bands and threaten to go zinging off into space where they'll likely put somebody's eye out.


"Hi, Manny," I said, taking the hand he offered. "I'm Shelley, Emily's ancient cousin, and these are my daughters Meelyn and Aisling who are just a couple of years younger than Emily, so they're not ancient, they're just cousins."


Meelyn and Aisling looked mortified, Emily beamed and Manny managed a slightly strangled, "Hinicetomeetyou," before he sank gratefully back onto the couch. Emily squeezed his hand, her face alight, and I was reminded vividly of the first time my husband met my family, which was two months before we got married and about three weeks after we met. Good times. Gooooood times. There were LOTS of conversations going on then, you betcha.


Dinner was served and everything was delicious and fattening and full of butter. I sat at the same table as Pat, where he informed me that he had been reading here on InsomniMom and that he wished to inform me that he does not pour a can of Sprite into the turkey's body cavity; it is a can of COKE, thank you very much. I told him I would add a retraction, so here it is, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky.


After lunch, we all idled around talking and eating pie, watching a little football, sneaking a piece of turkey here and there. The kids went down to the basement playroom to play Wii. Several people felt inclined to take naps and they were left to their peaceful dreams. I sat at the dining table with my father and my uncle and Pat and Poppy and Uncle Mike scandalized us with stories of their youth, many of which involved driving over the Ohio state line where the drinking age was nineteen, only they were sixteen.

"I don't think all the stories of our checkered youth are ready to be shared yet," I said to Pat, who gave me a brief, sidelong look that clearly said shutupshutupshutup. "I think they need to age for another twenty years or so before we share them."

Maybe at another Thanksgiving.

Week of Thanks - Day Two

Today, I am really thankful for the opportunity that my family has to just sit down after dinner in the evenings and watch television together, laughing, talking, arguing and enjoying one another's company. We're getting ready to watch So You Think You Can Dance as I type this post; it's a chilly night with the rain splashing down on the street outside the living room windows, the perfect cozy night for us three girls to pile onto the couch with the fleece throw blankets, the squooshy pillows and the dogs while Dad reigns supreme in his big recliner with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other.

It's so much fun, our favorite way to bond as a family, and whoops! Meelyn and Aisling just finished with the dishes and my husband has the show all cued up on the DVR, so I'd better grab my tea and go get settled.

Love the lovely family.

Week of Thanks - Day One

I am kind of a naturally grumpy person, so I don't think that gratitude -- thankfulness -- is something that comes to me easily. Sometimes I have to make myself think, "You should be thankful for this; you have been blessed by [add specific situation/name of person]." Not a very charming thing to admit.

It particularly bothers me that right now, with our U.S. economy in such turmoil, I have an extra hard time feeling gratitude, mostly because it seems that everything is so difficult. I get tired of not having money, of constantly worrying about bills and making sure my husband has some new boots before snow falls because his old boots are about five years old and have holes in the soles, and are we going to have to have a pre-emptive strike on the money my parents and grandparents give us for Christmas so that we can pay the utilities and the gas bill....it's just wearing. I feel like all this has changed me into a different kind of person, one who is warier and less hopeful and much less convinced that the future will be bright. Ugh.

But there are blessings that I definitely recognize. I'm not a total curmudgeon, after all. And the thing I feel the most gratitude for on this week leading up to Thanksgiving is the privilege of being Catholic. Knowing Jesus in the depth and breadth of His Church -- spiritually and historically -- has changed my entire life. Despite my many flaws and failings, I have loved Jesus since I was a child and it has been my greatest joy to be able to become closer to Him in the sacraments, the birthright of Christians everywhere.

"Better one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere."

-Psalm 84:10

Keeping my fingers crossed....

I have not acquitted myself well in my past two years of dressing-making at Thanksgiving dinner. Wait, no.... Make that three years.

1) Three years ago, my dressing tasted okay, but it came out of the baking dish crumbly instead of in the slab-like texture preferred by my family.

2) Two years ago, I used a Martha Stewart recipe, and let me just say that if there's a bullet that could bring down Martha Stewart Omnimedia like a fragile clay pigeon tracked by a high-powered rifle with a scope, that dressing recipe could do it. In a word, hoooouuuurrrrrppp. If that's a word. Maybe it's more of a sound. Only splashier. With chunks.

3) Last year, the recipe wasn't so bad, but the texture was terrible, still with the crumbly instead of the slabby. But worse, it was wet. Wet and smooshy, like something Gollum would serve at Thanksgiving dinner.

It's been a critical disappointment, because a plate of turkey and dressing is really all I want at Thanksgiving. We have mashed potatoes often because my husband is terrible partial to them and potatoes are cheap. We have green bean casserole for Sunday dinner several times a year; sweet potatoes are okay, and corn pudding I could never eat again. I am not a fan of dinner rolls, and I keep myself away from the pies because of my blood sugar. The only other Thanksgiving food I really pine for is the multi-layered Jell-O salad my aunt always brings. I adore Jell-O.

I'm not sure why it's been such a hard thing to get right. I mean, bread crumbs. Onion. Celery, sage, salt, broth, a couple of eggs... What's so hard about that? If you want to get really fancy, you throw in some dried cranberries and some walnuts. I've heard of people using sausage, too. So WHY CAN'T I GET IT RIGHT?!

Pat and Angie have been making fabulous turkeys for the past few years, and I think turkeys are much harder than dressing. Pat says it's easy, though. His fail-proof recipe is to roast it (in a bag? I think one of those bags is involved), using more butter than you ever thought possible, some salt and pepper and one can of Sprite poured into the cavity.

Maybe I should use a can of Sprite on my dressing instead of broth? Hmm.

Well. Anyway, I do have a recipe. In fact, I have two: One for cornbread dressing and the other for sage & onion dressing. I don't want to post either one for fear that they'll turn out awful and that I'll be exposed to the ridicule of the seventeen people who read this blog, most of whom are related to me.

I went to the store today and bought all my ingredients, which totaled something utterly ridiculous like $34.17. Until Thursday, then. Pray for me.

Thanksgiving countdown - one week!

This is a picture of our dining room with my big wooden bowl loaded with different knobbly gourds, some mini-pumpkins and four white pillar candles - a really pretty autumn centerpiece for the middle of the table.

I feel like I have a lot to be thankful for because this has been a pretty good year. We had a little bit more money this year, which meant we had only one unpleasant encounter with the utilities company last winter, ha ha ha! Ha! Ha. Huh. It's amazing that it's still hard to find that funny, even eight months later. Ugh.

But I also have a lot to be worried about, for instance: WHAT DRESSING RECIPE AM I GOING TO USE?!?! I am freaking out. I bring the dressing to Thanksgiving and the dressing I brought last year was awful. Oh, the recipe was okay, but after I baked it in the oven, I put it in my pre-heated slow-cooker to take to Pat and Angie's house, where we have Thanksgiving dinner. They live about twenty-five minutes away, and by the time my dressing got done steaming, it was total mush. Slimy. Oh my gosh, it was terrible; the only time I have EVER thrown leftover dressing away. It was pure smoosh, and I don't think even the dogs would have eaten it.

So maybe I'll make the same recipe, but just bake it at home and heat it up in the oven at Pat and Angie's house. (If we'd all known when they built that house that we were going to be having Thanksgiving there every year, we would have campaigned for double ovens.)

Our family likes firm dressing that comes out of the 9x13 casserole dish in slabs, a bit moist underneath, brown on top and crispy around the edges. This is what I am determined to serve.

Hopefully, this time next week, I'll be giving thanks for a successful attempt. PRESSURE!!!!

It's beginning to look a lot like, what?

Thanksmas? Is that what you'd call this time of year?

Because I know for sure that Halloween just passed - we've still got a giant jack-o-lantern taped to our big front window to prove it. Plus I remember going to the All Saints Vigil Mass on Saturday, seeing as how it was only two days ago.

And that means time is drawing closer to the final Thursday of the month, which is Thanksgiving Day this year, and Thanksgiving is always a nice holiday for, you know, being thankful and eating things. And then eating a dressing sandwich on Friday made of a slab of dressing cut in two with slices of turkey in the middle, garnished with lashings of gravy and then heated up in the microwave and eaten from a paper plate with a cornucopia printed on it. Maybe with a matching napkin.

So why then, when I walk into Hobby Lobby or Wal-Mart and similar establishments, am I accosted by festive Christmas displays featuring Mr. and Mrs. Clauses that really move (which could only be creepier if they were wearing clown suits), and enormous Christmas trees with lavish decorations and piles of Christmas cards, twinkle lights and candy dishes shaped like snowmen and trumpet-blowing angels?

(Last year the girls and I went into Hobby Lobby and employees were busily replacing the Christmas decorations with Valentine's Day decorations and it was still a week before Christmas. Hobby Lobby, you have got to be kidding me...)

What happened to Thanksgiving? If I try to eat a dressing sandwich on Friday, November 27 this year, is some retailer with a bureaucratic gleam in his eye going to force his way into my kitchen and slap the sandwich out of my hand, snarling, "Look here, YOU. It's been nothing but candy canes and sugarplums SINCE OCTOBER 15. SO PUT DOWN THAT TURKEY AND EAT THIS STOLLEN RIGHT NOW"?

Poor Thanksgiving, the forgotten holiday.