Tag Archives: Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving Bird

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At Ann’s request, and our agreement, turkey was the meat for Thanksgiving dinner this year. I can’t remember the last time it was. More recently than this bird, however. Maybe this one? If so, it’s been quite a while.

How it looked on the table.

Not an overly large bird, since there were only three of us. Also, it came already smoked, so all I had to do was unwrap it and heat it for a couple of hours at a fairly low heat. Pretty tasty. Even at its size, much leftover meat remains in the refrigerator.

How it looked on the plate.

My plate, illustrating my longstanding preference for dark meat, with rolls, stuffing, olives and some mac & cheese artfully created by Ann. It’s now a Thanksgiving and Christmas specialty of hers.

Thanksgiving ’20 &c.

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Clear and cool lately, with daytime temps in the 50s. Not bad for late November. So far, no snow yet except for a dusting we had a few days before Halloween. It didn’t last. Next time, it probably will.
october snow
Pleasant Thanksgiving at home. Nothing made from scratch this year except the gravy, but the boxed macaroni and stuffing you can get at Trader Joe’s isn’t bad at all. And what’s a Thanksgiving dinner without olives, I tell my family. They aren’t persuaded.
Thanksgiving victuals
Took a walk last weekend at Fabbrini Park in Hoffman Estates.
Fabbrini Park
The geese were still around, mucking up the place.

Pre-Thanksgiving Travel Tips

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Peaked at about 65 degrees F today, which wasn’t too bad, though the wind was strong. A little cooler tomorrow, the NWS says, and then a string of days down toward freezing.

Back to posting around November 29. We aren’t going anywhere, but for us Thanksgiving hasn’t usually been a traveling holiday anyway. Got at least one Zoom with friends to look forward to, and conversations with Lilly.

We won’t be alone in sticking around at home. “Based on mid-October forecast models, AAA would have expected up to 50 million Americans to travel for Thanksgiving – a drop from 55 million in 2019,” AAA reports (for Memorial Day this year, the organization didn’t even publish an estimate).

“However, as the holiday approaches and Americans monitor the public health landscape, including rising COVID-19 positive case numbers, renewed quarantine restrictions and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) travel health notices, AAA expects the actual number of holiday travelers will be even lower.”

AAA also has advice for intrepid travelers who do brave the road, including what to do at hotels and when you rent a car. I have my own tips:

Hotels: Prior to any hotel stay, call ahead at least a dozen times, and ask very carefully and clearly, “Is it safe?” Like Laurence Olivier’s evil dentist in Marathon Man (see this hard-to-watch clip). Upon arrival, insist that the clerk throw the key card at you as you run through the lobby. Once in your room, don’t emerge for any reason. Close the curtains, take a two-hour shower and call the front desk a few more times to make sure it’s safe.

Rental cars: Under no circumstances approach the counter. Call from at least two city blocks away and explain that you want to car left another two blocks from your location, with the keys in the ignition and engine idling, so you don’t have to touch them. Once you reach the car, spray with disinfectant for at least 15 minutes, inside and out. Let dry for four hours and then you can drive it.

Just having fun with the current crisis. If you can’t do that, gloom will cloud your thoughts. At the same time, I’m not going to be one of those doorknobs who insists that a minor inconvenience like a mask is on par with a major abrogation of civil rights.

Thanksgiving Dinner 2019

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December didn’t arrive with a blast of snow, but instead gray skies that gave up rain from time to time, which — by Sunday just after dark — had turned into light snow. In other words, weather like we’ve had much of the time since the Halloween snow fell, followed by the Veterans Day snow.

Come to think of it, we had Palm Sunday snow this year. Seems like a year for named-day snows. But no Thanksgiving snow. Or Absence of Color Friday snow (well, maybe).

Took no pictures of 2019 Thanksgiving dinner. Will there be a time when it’s socially mandatory to take a picture of every special-event or holiday meal? Or every meal? Sounds like a small component of dark tale you’d see in Black Mirror.

This year’s meal looked pretty much like this plate — same kind of fish bought from the same place — and was just as good, with the food prepared mostly by my daughters’ skilled hands. Chocolate creme pie for dessert, also from a store, and one we’ve enjoyed before. I did all cleanup, a multi-pan, multi-dish, many-utensil effort, but worth it.

Tintinabulation &c

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A classic November day outside my window today. Slate gray sky, rain in the morning, chilly but not freezing, gusts of wind pushing leaves around. At least week’s ice and snow are gone. They’ll be back. A brown Christmas would suit me fine, but I can’t count on it.

Back to posting after Thanksgiving, around December 1, after a week-long holiday from posting, but not from work this year. Still, being off on Thursday and Friday — which will include no special consumer activity on my part — ought to be pretty sweet, as always.

We will probably hit the grocery store on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. Meat, carbohydrates, sweets, etc. Exact menu to be determined in conference with the rest of my family in the near future.

Here’s Phil Ochs’ adaption of Poe’s “The Bells.” Didn’t know about it until recently. Nice.

I have a big book of Poe’s work from the library that I’ve been grazing lately. Read “The Bells” again, among other things, after many years. I’d forgotten most of it. Somehow I didn’t notice when I was younger that the poem progresses from silver to gold to brass (brazen) to iron bells — from merriment to happiness to alarm to death, or at least what I take for death in poem, though not the song:

They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!

Last night I read “Hop-Frog,” which I hadn’t before. A neat little revenge story, like “The Cask of the Amontillado,” though not quite in the same horrifying league. I guessed the ending — what violence Hop-Frog was planning. No matter. Poe’s usually worth a read. The influence of even that minor story seems to turn up in odd places.

November Leftovers

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The amount of Thanksgiving leftovers, a week after the holiday, is down to a single container, a mix of stuffing and mashed potatoes. It has taken some eating to get to this point.

A week ago, our plates were full like so:

The protein this year, tilapia. On this plate, stuffing transitions to potatoes and that transitions to macaroni and cheese, something like the snow-ice-rain progression on recent weather maps.

A Wad of Paper Circulars

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We still get a paper newspaper some days of the week, and last Wednesday’s newspaper was the heaviest I’d lifted off the driveway in years. It was a regularly sized mid-week paper supplemented by a weighty array of circulars, mostly from retailers fighting the battle against stagnant physical-store sales, though of course most have online sales as well.

They included (no special order): Macy’s, World Market, Sprint, Carson’s, The Dump, Best Buy, Abt, Duluth Trading, La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery, AT&T, JC Penney, Kohl’s, Guitar Center, Mattress Firm, Bed Bath & Beyond, The Tile Store, Home Depot, Fannie May, Verizon, Sears, Art Van Furniture, Ulta Beauty, JoAnn, Staples, Office Depot/Office Max, Ashley Homestore, Value City Furniture, Walgreen’s, Sleep Number, Kmart, Walmart, HOBO (Home Owners Bargain Outlet), Bose, Toys R Us, Lowe’s, CVS and Target.

Some of these retailers aren’t just fighting to keep their physical stores busy, but against ending up in the dustbin of retail history. If you know even a little about retail, you can guess which ones those are.

The only one on the list I’d never heard of was The Dump. It calls itself “America’s Furniture Outlet.” As far as I can tell, there’s only one in the Chicago area, in west suburban Lombard. The brand is in nine other markets around the country and, strangely enough, notes its web site: “Regular stores open every day of the week and you pay for. [sic] We are only open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which keeps our cost of doing business down.”

Thanksgiving ’16

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One of the good things about Thanksgiving is that, while the next day technically isn’t a holiday — and some years ago, I worked for a skinflint who insisted that people work that day — it really is part of the holiday. So for me the thing stretched from Wednesday afternoon to Sunday afternoon (I usually get back to work on Sunday evening, since things need to be filed Monday morning).

Our Thanksgiving meal was pretty much the same as it has been for the last few years, after Lilly took over the making of the major starches: mashed potatoes, stuffing, macaroni and cheese. The meat, ham. The bread, King’s Hawaiian. The drink, Martinelli’s sparkling cider. The dessert, pecan pie. Call it habit, call it tradition.

Time to read: a valuable commodity. Needing something light, I buzzed through Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (2015), a popular history by Sarah Vowell, which guarantees a humorous tone. Humorous, but with genuine historical information included and, something I particularly like, accounts of her visits to often obscure places and monuments associated with the subject. In this case, sites associated with Lafayette. In the case of the only other book of hers I’ve read, Assassination Vacation, sites associated with the deaths of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley.

There was also time over the holiday to watch a few movies, two on the small screen, one on the big screen. Radio Days, which I hadn’t seen since it was new. I appreciate the wonderful soundtrack a lot more now than I did then. Then there was Twelve O’Clock High, a first-rate war movie and Gregory Peck vehicle that I’d never seen before.

On Saturday, we all went to a nearby movie theater. Lilly and Ann wanted to see The Edge of Seventeen, a coming-of-age flick. Yuriko and I weren’t interested in that, so we saw Doctor Strange, a superhero movie about a character I knew virtually nothing about. Been a while since I’ve seen a comic-book inspired movie, especially in the theater. It was better than I expected. The story wasn’t great, but it managed to avoid outright stupidity, and the CGI was astonishingly good.

I also saw pieces of movies over the holiday. Days off or not, I see more pieces of movies now than whole ones, because there’s work to do, but also because I often don’t feeling like sitting through a whole movie, especially ones I’ve seen before, or already decided I don’t need to see.

Between Wednesday and today, I saw pieces of (no more than 30 minutes, no special order): Swing Shift, The Gay Divorcee, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Marie Antoinette (2006), The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Gone With the Wind, The Godfather, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Capote, Juno, and Gran Torino. The last two were the only ones I’d never seen before. I lucked into some justly famous scenes in a few cases, such as the escape from burning Atlanta in GWTW, and the particularly memorable Phoebe Cates scene in Fast Times.

Thanksgiving & The Days After ’15

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On the whole, Thanksgiving outside was gray and rainy, but pleasantly warm for this time of the year. The days afterward were drier but much chillier, though not quite freezing.

Pictured: an all-too-common meal snapshot, in this case most of my Thanksgiving dinner. Note the artless presentation. I did that myself. I don’t remember what the plastic fork was doing there, but I will assert that we used metal utensils.
Thanksgiving chow '15The ham came from a warehouse store, while Lilly prepared the various starches, with Ann’s assistance. She combined four or five different cheeses for the macaroni and cheese. It isn’t Thanksgiving without that, she said, and it was the star attraction of the plate. For those who fret about such things, there was a green item on the menu, too: green beans, which didn’t make into the picture, but did make it into my stomach.

Once again, Martinelli’s sparkling cider was the main drink — original and cranberry/apple — though we also opened a bottle of wine we bought at a winery near Traverse City in 2007. I’d post the name of the wine, but that would involve going out to the refrigerator in the garage, where it’s now stored, and reading the label. It was a pretty good Riesling.

Some people shop on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That’s never been my ambition. My ambition is to do as close to nothing that day as possible. Days like that are very rare. This year I almost achieved it. Almost, but not quite.

Which reminds me of this exchange in Office Space.

Michael Bolton: You were supposed to come in on Saturday. What were you doing?

Peter Gibbons: Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.

On Saturday, we watched Vancouver Asahi, a Japanese movie on TV about the baseball team of that name, composed of Japanese-Canadian players during its heyday in the 1930s, when there used to be a Japantown in Vancouver. Not bad on the whole, though about 30 minutes too long. It also had the virtue of being about something I’d never heard of before.

After the movie ended, at about 11:30 in the evening, I went out on the deck and could see Orion to the south, parading across a nice clear sky. Never mind the solstice. Winter’s here.

More Moo Goo Gai Pan

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Back again on November 29. A good Thanksgiving to all. The snow, which has been melting all day, ought to be gone by then, leaving cold mud. But snow will be back before long. Never mind the snows of yesteryear. There’s always plenty more this year.

Sand, as I’ve noted before, is good for adding traction to icy driveways and sidewalks. Something I’ve learned this year: playground sand isn’t what you want. At freezing temps it tents to stick together, which makes for lousy spreading. Tube sand, which I’ve long used, is the thing.

It’s been 40 years since the original broadcast of “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the episode of The Bob Newhart Show in which Emily’s out of town for Thanksgiving, so Bob spends the holiday with Howard and Jerry and Mr. Carlin watching a football game. They get blotto and order an excess of Moo Goo Gai Pan from a Chinese restaurant.

How much pretend-drunk comedy is there now? Not much, I think, though I don’t spend a lot of time watching sitcoms any more. I’ll leave it to others to tease out the social implications of that. It’s enough for me to note that there’s no equivalent of Foster Brooks on prime time that I know of. Then again, there’s not really any such thing as prime time any more.