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December 15, 2020
The View From Dry Creek Hill
Charles Prokop
www.DryCreekHill.com
Desperate for a return to some kind of normalcy this holiday season, my wife and I decided to celebrate Thanksgiving in a way we’d never done before. Before you think it makes no sense to do something totally different to get back to normal, let me explain.
Loretta and I will have been married for 50 years this next spring. This Thanksgiving was the 51st we’d spent together, although the 1st one was a “more or less” together deal. We’d met a month or so earlier and her car broke down as she was driving back to Houston from a Thanksgiving visit to Abilene. She called me, I think it was from around Somerville, and I drove up to help. After we got her car going I followed as her car limped along, blowing oil out the exhaust and onto my car. So we weren’t really together for Thanksgiving, but we were in sight of each other’s car lights through an oily haze at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend.
We got married the next spring. Sometimes we spent Thanksgiving with her family or my family, sometimes with friends, sometimes at an RV park pot-luck, but usually it was just the two of us. We had turkey and all the trimmings with other people, but we always did something different when it was just us. We had ham, game hens, shrimp and steak. We went out a few times. But there was one thing we never did. We never cooked a turkey.
So in this year of normalcy gone missing we did something totally different to get back to normal. For the very first of our 51 (or 50, take your pick) Thanksgivings together, we returned to a tradition we had never celebrated. We roasted a turkey.
And it worked out fine, if you ignore the fact that the defrosting instructions for even a small turkey ridiculously underestimate how long it will take and we ended up eating the turkey the next day. But it was a good day-after-Thanksgiving feast.
And on the topic of holiday traditions, we did not do something we’ve always done on Thanksgiving. We did not watch the Dallas Cowboys. They don’t deserve our attention these days. The word “turkeys” comes to mind.
I can’t wait to see what Christmas is like.
Loretta and I will have been married for 50 years this next spring. This Thanksgiving was the 51st we’d spent together, although the 1st one was a “more or less” together deal. We’d met a month or so earlier and her car broke down as she was driving back to Houston from a Thanksgiving visit to Abilene. She called me, I think it was from around Somerville, and I drove up to help. After we got her car going I followed as her car limped along, blowing oil out the exhaust and onto my car. So we weren’t really together for Thanksgiving, but we were in sight of each other’s car lights through an oily haze at the end of the Thanksgiving weekend.
We got married the next spring. Sometimes we spent Thanksgiving with her family or my family, sometimes with friends, sometimes at an RV park pot-luck, but usually it was just the two of us. We had turkey and all the trimmings with other people, but we always did something different when it was just us. We had ham, game hens, shrimp and steak. We went out a few times. But there was one thing we never did. We never cooked a turkey.
So in this year of normalcy gone missing we did something totally different to get back to normal. For the very first of our 51 (or 50, take your pick) Thanksgivings together, we returned to a tradition we had never celebrated. We roasted a turkey.
And it worked out fine, if you ignore the fact that the defrosting instructions for even a small turkey ridiculously underestimate how long it will take and we ended up eating the turkey the next day. But it was a good day-after-Thanksgiving feast.
And on the topic of holiday traditions, we did not do something we’ve always done on Thanksgiving. We did not watch the Dallas Cowboys. They don’t deserve our attention these days. The word “turkeys” comes to mind.
I can’t wait to see what Christmas is like.