Thanksgiving: an overview

Wednesday: I drive down to Seattle to pick up my brother from UW. We arrive back in Bellingham safely and head over to my mom's, where Mom and I make desserts (for her, French apple pie; for me, chocolate cheesecake). Mom puts her pies in the oven before realizing that she forgot to add vanilla, and later, as I'm measuring vanilla into my cheescake, the top of the bottle pops off and drops several tablespoons of vanilla into the batter. I test the batter; it tastes like alcohol. We throw it away and start over.

Thursday: I wake up with a pounding headache. Despite a shower and a cup of tea, I go back to bed and do not get up until 11, at which point I inform Mitch (from beneath several blankets, both cats and a satin eye pillow) that I don't think I'll be making it to the Rosenburg dinner at noon. He goes without me, but does bring our friend Manis, whose family lives in Florida, and Mitch makes jokes about Manis being my stand-in. They are well received.

By three o'clock, I finally manage to open my eyes, though I still haven't made it successfully out of bed. Mitch and Manis return to collect me for my Mom's Thanksgiving--I roll out of bed, put on a skirt and somehow make it out the door (feeling much, much better, though still not great). The house is full of guests and merriment, and it is a lovely evening, though one punctuated by naps on my part. What little I manage to eat of the food is delicious. We all go home full and sleepy.

Friday: The last dinner, at my Dad's house, is wonderful. I make a puddle on my plate of all my food and eat it forkful by mushy forkful--after nearly two weeks of being sick, my appetite is finally back nearly to where it should be and everything tastes amazing. My brother plays Zelda in the family room after dinner and we watch him until we can't stand it anymore. We decorate the Christmas tree. Dad tries to make five whiskey sours with a bottle of whiskey and one lemon, until my step-mom scrutinizes his recipe and decides that there has to be more to whiskey sours than that. As it turns out, there is. The result is tasty and festive, though I don't think I ever actually finish mine.

Apparently "snoggy" is not a real word

In my family, if you go into a store full of breakable things, it's a "kabosh" store. If a parent says "kabosh," you put your hands in your pockets--it means "look, don't touch."

In my family, when we go out for frozen yogurt, we say we're going out for "frozen whopper."

If your nose is stuffed up from a cold and you're breathing like Darth Vader, we say that you're "snoggy." I only recently realized that snoggy isn't a word outside my familial lexicon when I dropped it in conversation with my boss--I mentioned that I was feeling much better, thank you, though still a bit snoggy, and she wrinkled her nose and asked, "Still a bit what?"

In my family, when we say grace before a meal, we call it "dee-doos"--even in public places. When Mom and I go out to lunch, she grabs my hands, says "Let's say dee-doos," and launches into our family grace: "Thank you for our food and for each other, Amen." Like that, in one breath. Anyone who's eaten with our family more than three times knows about this and has our "dee-doos" committed to memory.

For a long time I did not think this odd, our deedoos, and then somewhere around high school I did, and I protested, because I wasn't into all that God stuff, and then I was into the God stuff but I still protested because I wasn't sure how sincere a prayer "Thank you for our food and for each other, Amen" could really be when you rattled it off every evening without thinking. At some point, though, I realized that it's a great prayer, concise, to the point, even if we don't open with "Heavenly Father" or "Dear Lord," because we know (and He knows) to whom we are speaking.

We have said this for as long as I can remember, and like "snoggy," "kabosh" and the word "dee-doos," I have no idea where it came from, but the more I say it the more I love saying it--the chorus of our voices, the squeeze of hands at the end, the reminder that, yes, the meal is lovely, but so is the company. So:

Thank you for our food, and for each other. Amen.

Happy Thanksgiving, eh?

Ha! Thanksgiving has arrived! Before you start panicking, though, keep in mind that the Michaelis family functions on a whole other timeline--Thanksgiving comes before Halloween. It's just easier that way.

So, dinner's tonight, and I'm making dessert. My house smells like pumpkin.

In other news, we (Mitch, Lyle and I) are going to a Black Eyes & Neckties show after dinner--never seen 'em play before, and I know something like half the band from the days of yore. Haven't seen 'em in ages. It'll be great.