Thanksgiving is on the horizon, and to get everyone ready for the cooking and the horde of family members who will complain about your food, question all of your hard work and then spend the whole day fighting like a pack of drunken honey badgers, I’ve put together this quiz. Answers at the bottom. 1. How do you know when the turkey is ready? A. It reaches an internal temperature of 865 degrees. B. The ice chunk in the body cavity finally melts. C. You get tired of guests asking when it’s going to be ready so you just start carving it, even though the juices aren’t running clear. D. You have a “hunch” or a “good feeling about it.” 2. At what time is it appropriate to open the first bottle of wine? A. 5:15 a.m. B. 5:30 a.m. C. 5:45 a.m. D. After the 52nd time your mother calls asking when she is supposed to come over. 3. What is the best way to defuse family tension at the dinner table? A. Tap dance routine. B. Faking appendicitis. C. Blurting out as loud as you can: “IT WAS COL. MUSTARD IN THE PARLOR WITH THE PIPE!!!” D. Demand that all family members submit to genetic testing to prove that you are related by blood.
Long live Halloween, said the dad with the stretched waistband
At the last moment, Halloween was saved. My worst fears — that a pyramid-sized pile of candy wouldn’t materialize from my daughter’s well-worn trick-or-treating pumpkin — were allayed. Long live Halloween … the night when dads gorge themselves on the spoils of their children’s hard work. But this year, it wasn’t looking so good. My 11-year-old daughter had decided a week or so ago she wasn’t going to participate. No dressing up. No trick-or-treating with friends. No pyramid of sweetness for dear old dad. She would just give out candy at home … THAT WE HAD TO BUY!!! My daughter only eats about a third of her candy from Halloween: pink and red Starbursts, a scattering of Skittles, Whoppers and a few other sugar-laden, artificially-dyed brands. They have to meet her high standards, and not seem tampered with. (If a cat so much as looks at my child funny, she blacklists the house, quarantines the candy as “tampered with” and turns it over to me.) All that candy – Almond Joys, Snickers, Baby Ruths! – all become mine.
Send in the real Easter candy
Easter just isn’t understood in my house. Oh, as a religious season? A time of rebirth? Sure, but not the other meaning of Easter: Eating enough candy to rot out real teeth, porcelain teeth … shoot, even the teeth on your chain saw. That it is a time for copious amounts of sugar in the form of marshmallow animals, chocolate bunnies, malted milk eggs and an assortment of candies that seem hatched straight from some mad scientist’s lab. “Hey, how about a chocolate egg with a creamy filling that’s actually like yoke? Just disgusting enough to be delicious!” And the grocery store is awash in it. Bags of it. All kinds of shapes and sizes. If you want a life-sized chocolate elephant with a jelly bean center, they’ve got it. But you know who doesn’t have it? The only house in American lacking a dump truck full of sweet garbage goodness: Mine. How is this possible? I have an 11-year-old.
The (somewhat) flight of the Christmas drone
I was told a cautionary tale about a boy who got a drone. It cost several hundred dollars and was as top of the line as you can get. He charged up the battery. He went through his pre-flight check. He set it all up at a park and lifted of gracefully. Then promptly set it down in a lake. Plunk! Goodbye expensive drone. I thought of this story as my daughter and I set up her drone for its first flight in a park down the street. Big, menacing oaks with mighty claws loomed over us. Cars passed by on the street within controller range. Obstacles and dangers were everywhere. But that wouldn’t be us. I was going to be careful with her new Christmas present. I watched a Youtube video! “The key,” I told my daughter, “is to take it slow. Go easy and don’t liftoff too fast. I’ll go first because I have experience with these things. I’ll just hover it about eye level and then land it carefully. OK? It’s not going to be super exciting, but it will be safe and cautious.”
Remembering the best Christmas gift of all
“Dial it down please,” said my wife to our 10-year-old daughter. “I can’t,” she replied. “It’s Christmas and I’m really hyper!” She didn’t need to point out that obvious fact. She was bouncing off the walls. Riling up the dog. Dancing about. Speaking so fast that she sounded like an auctioneer on fire. I worried that maybe she had stuck her finger in a light socket, or had taken up drinking espresso. But no: It’s Christmas! When you’re a kid, it’s just about impossible to contain your enthusiasm this time of year. And when you’re a Christmas kid — born during the season — there’s absolutely no hope. That’s exactly what my daughter is: A Christmas kid. Born on Dec. 26. In fact, she began her long journey into the world on Christmas morning when my wife’s water broke while we were opening presents. The little child didn’t seem too concerned that we were an hour away from having family over, or that I might want another cup of coffee. (At least she had the decency to drag the labor out and didn’t emerge until the next day.)
The perils of holiday gift giving
It is better to give than it is to receive. Yes, yes this is true. But it is definitely easier to RECEIVE than it is to GIVE. Especially when your family won’t tell you what they want and it’s only … holy cow juice! … like a week until Christmas! Forget giving, I’ve got to start BUYING! But I’m stumped this year. It’s always hard, but it seems this year it’s been especially difficult to come up with ideas. Or pry ideas out of people. That includes my daughter, who turns 11 the day after Christmas. Maybe it’s a tough age — an age when toys of yesteryear don’t quite cut it. Instead, electronics and other big ticket items are more important. Conversations in my house sound like this now: Me: Child, why is your homework all over my desk?!? Child: Because I needed the computer for it AND I don’t have a computer OF MY OWN in my room … hint, hint, hint … Me: YOU’RE NOT GETTING A COMPUTER FOR CHRISTMAS!!! AND YOU’RE NEVER ALLOWED TO DATE BOYS!!!
The Christmas advice column
I think it’s time for a new tradition here in the column: answering questions about Christmas that you always wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask your friends. So, consider this my holiday present to you: Q. Is there a statute of limitations on sending Christmas cards? A. According to the Institute on Postal Greetings, ideally your Christmas cards should arrive at least 5 days before Christmas. It is acceptable, but slightly uncouth, to knowingly send cards that arrive up to 3 weeks after Christmas. It is HIGHLY DISCOURAGED, however, to send the cards you made 7 years ago and never mailed out because you were in charge of getting stamps, but couldn’t remember where the Post Office was. Q. When your wife opens up her Christmas present, finds an electric leg shaver and says, “Oh, honey! Just what I always wanted,” does she really mean it? A. No! Of course not. That was a terrible gift. You knew that going into it. The only reason you bought it was it had been marked down 40 percent, plus there was an additional discount because it was missing key parts. Take the fact that she is pretending to like it — and not hitting you over the head with it! — as a kind of moral victory.
The Florida scrub brush Christmas tree
My mother wants a 2-foot Christmas tree. A real one. Cut fresh from a Florida tree farm. Only 2 feet tall! “Two feet?!?” I gasped in horror when she told me this. “That’s not even a tree. That’s a weed!” My mother likes scrub brush pines. The kind that grow in the sand or gravel. In my mother’s mind, it’s the classic Florida Christmas tree. They are so starved for water from the never-ending drought that they look like they have mange. We find them at a Christmas tree farm in Eustis where you cut them down yourself. Actually, many of them look quite pretty. But to get the size my mother wants — before they grow to a normal height, fill out and look pleasant — you have to sift through a selection of odd-shaped sprouts and runts. Since my mother doesn’t go — she just hands me a check and some strict orders — we have to make the call ourselves. My mother doesn’t ever water her tree. By the time Christmas comes, the poor guy is little more than a shriveled stick with clumps of brown needles hanging on for dear life. The tree gets so dry that it risks spontaneously combusting, and for that reason, no one wants to sit by it as we pass around the presents.
And many thanks are given
What am I thankful for this year? Simple things. Some are in the future. Like how I’m going to remember to defrost the turkey early this year. Maybe then I won’t have to stand panicked in the kitchen with a hair dryer as I try to get a leg to un-freeze. Or jam a hand into the cavity of the bird while desperately trying to pry some giblets out. Nothing like getting frost-bite in the process. I wonder if Thanksgiving is the only time Florida hospitals have to treat patients for frostbite? I’m thankful there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out next month. If I’m lucky — if we’re ALL really lucky — there will be a new one every year for the rest of my life. Even though I feel guilty about it — because others I know weren’t so lucky — I’m thankful that my street sits so high up in Lincolnville. That the surging waters of Hurricane Matthew tried, but just couldn’t overcome that elevation. And I’m thankful that as bad as it was, it wasn’t worse. That it didn’t come 15-20 miles — shoot, even 5 miles — closer to the coast. Imagine if it had.
Goodbye to the holiday snacks
I went searching for the holiday chocolates. The peanut brittle. The pecan pie. The $75 worth of exotic cheeses that my aunt had brought to town (inexplicably, she forgot the crackers!) The candied nuts. The salami with the peppercorn coating. The last edible vestiges of a bygone holiday season. Anything. I would have taken anything. But the cubbards were bare. The snack drawer famished. The refrigerator shelves like salt flats. The holidays? Officially over. The holiday snack bonanza had gone. It isn’t when the Christmas tree comes down that I rue the end of the holidays. Not the Christmas lights getting boxed up or the absence of Christmas music played from sunrise to sunset. (Actually, my daughter still does that.) But when the holiday snack well runs dry, the reality sinks in, and I sink into a deep, dark depression. “There’s nothing to eat for dessert,” I grumbled pathetically to my wife one night, exasperated. “Have we been robbed?!?” “You’re used to the Christmas cornucopia,” she replied. “Now it’s a wasteland. You’re going to have to cope. Detox. Get some professional help. Maybe eat a carrot.” A carrot! What kind of answer was that? For weeks, I had lived like a Christmas king, feasting on teeth-rotting and waistline-expanding delicacies. Now I was ruined. This wouldn’t do. I couldn’t go back. My eyes darted around wildly as I tried to make sense of it. A “wasteland?” No, there had to be something. I stood at the door of the pantry, trying […]