Macey's Thanksgiving Turkey

 

I am sitting at my kitchen table looking at the snow, while my three year old watches Iron Man 2 – don’t judge me.  What’s more worrying is that I find myself strangely attracted to Mickey Rourke in this film.  That is what you should be judging me for, not the fact that I am knowingly raising a delinquent. 

It is negative gazillion outside and I need to go to the store for Thanksgiving.  I have to buy everything I will need for a small family of 5 Thanksgiving.  This is not very easy because I do not want to gain the ten pounds I have lost by counting the points that Big Brother, a.k.a. Weight Watchers, has given to every food created.  So I can’t buy a ready-made pie, because my family does not eat pie.  I may not finish off the mashed potatoes but I could very easily sit down with the pie pan three fourths full and finish it off while reading a nice book.  Or a trashy book.  Or both, depending on the size of the pie.  So I am going to make a Weight Watchers pumpkin pie.  It has graham cracker crust, but the rest seems to be the same.  If I don’t eat for the rest of the week, I can have as much pie as I want.  Maybe two.

I was going to buy a turkey breast because three of our five do not understand how much you are supposed to eat at Thanksgiving yet.  Katherine will ask if she has to eat everything on her plate and Seth will have his Storm Trooper hiding in the potatoes before I have to loosen the top button of my jeans.  When I bring out the “pumpkin pie,” they will ask for chocolate cake.  Or just the frosting.  Or maybe just Thanksgiving decorated Oreos. 

So here is my dilemma:  do I make the traditional foods, like pumpkin pie, or do I make cupcakes that the kids will like more?  In five or so years, they will be addicted to the traditional foods and then all will be well.  But I have to go through the next five years.  I think I should have gone to my parents.  Then there would have been more people there and they would have succumbed to peer pressure.  Actually, tradition has been eroding from my parents’ house lately.  My sister brings a Costco pumpkin pie instead of making one.  That is almost as bad as making a pie with a graham cracker crust, in my personal opinion.  I don’t care if Costco makes a good pie.  Thanksgiving is the time for homemade food and if you can’t cook, it is the time to eat someone else’s homemade food.  That is the spirit.

So now I am stuck in negative weather, writing down ingredients for recipes I can eat more of while Big Brother is watching.  When really I should be writing stories about other people’s Thanksgivings, selling those stories, and ending up in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.  I want to be on the big paper Mache turkey whose wings flap and the head moves from side to side.  I think that is a nice attainable goal.  It’s good to keep your goals attainable during the holiday season.  If you don’t, you end up eating the whole Costco pumpkin pie your sister brings.  In a closet.  Behind the bathrobe.