Christmas Part I: The Turkey Debacle

I've had worse Yuletides, that's for sure, but nevertheless, Christmas 2006 had its own special flavor of stress and humor.
The weekend began on Friday with a fantastic Girls' Night with LilCherie and Pioneer Girl (formerly known here as "H.") Pioneer Girl handmade the lovely Elvis treeskirts for LilCherie and me...are those the best or what??? It made quite the impression when I wore it home to my parents' house for our family celebration. We got a hot-tub suite at a hotel in a nearby town, had a fabulous meal and a little shopping excursion in the quaint downtown area. We watched some video footage from one of our previous Girls' Nights, which was hilarious; took soaks in the hot tub; smoked a ton of cigarettes; and watched the movie "Evil Bong," which was terrible in a good way. Miraculously, the next day we returned to an empty house at LilCherie's and a happy J. in a good mood already on his way to pick me up.

Saturday was spent doing some last minute Christmas shopping and going to the grocery store for the ingredients for my annual holiday food contributions of butterhorns and pecan pie. Bubba, who didn't get a real nap during the day, fell asleep at roughly 4:30 p.m. J. went out at 5:30 to do some last minute Christmas shopping for me. At 6 p.m. I tried waking Bubba up and soon realized I didn't have the heart to do it. I changed his diaper and laid down with him in bed, rationalizing that maybe he'd just sleep through since he hadn't had a nap. Yeah, right. In the process of settling him in bed, I fell asleep as well. We both woke up at 10:30, at which point I made the startling realization that I still had to do the baking and wrap some presents. Bubba and J. were up until 1 a.m.; I was up until 3:30. We got up at 7:30 Sunday morning to head back to my parents' house.

Despite the lack of sleep, I rallied quite well and we made it to my parents' house by 9 a.m. or so (I'm sure the magical power of the treeskirt helped me out a bit, because I was so excited to wear it!) My sister, brother-in-law and my two neices arrived by 10:00. We decided to wait for my oldest neice's boyfriend to come in before we opened gifts. After he was half an hour late, my neice called him to find out his stepfather had, at the last minute, made him do chores so he didn't know when he would be in. Tears from my neice and comforting by the rest of the womenfolk ensued, then we decided to open stockings. Boyfriend arrived in an hour and Christmas went on as planned. Until....

...my mom, sister and dad went downstairs to the back-up basement oven to check the progress of the turkey. After 7 hours roasting, it was still cool and not brown at all. My mom had decided to use the new roasting pan my sister and I gave her for her birthday two weeks ago, and initially that was to blame for the turkey's poor performance. While Mom and sis were deciding what to do, Dad got disgusted because they were "just standing there with the oven open letting all the heat out." He came upstairs and sulked, my sister came upstairs and they exchanged some bitchy words, and I found Boyfriend playing some videogames with my husband and informed him that the annual "family hubbub" was beginning so if he wanted to witness a tradition he should get out to the living room (he didn't). Mom and sis decided to put the turkey in the good old roaster, crank up the heat and leave it alone for another two hours.

At 2:30 p.m., with a famished crowd staving off hypoglycemia with Christmas cookies, my Mom and Dad saw that the turkey had browned some, the meat thermometer was at a safe 190 degrees, and the little popper had popped. My mother practically danced a jig as my father hauled the bird upstairs. All was well for a great 5 minutes until Dad began carving and realized....the thing was still pink inside. There was talk about microwaving it in slices before the disgusted looks on my face and my sisters' killed that idea. The stuffing was salvaged and put into the microwave to make sure it wasn't laden with salmonella. My mother finally broke down, shrieked "This is a disaster!" and started crying as Dad took the turkey away. (Turns out, even after three or four more hours of cooking, it still looked pink. We think now perhaps it was dyed to look fresher in the meat case; we really don't know what happened.)

My mother, in tears at the counter as she prepared the last of the side dishes, told everyone who was trying to comfort her to go away and leave her alone. Of course I stayed and asked her "Mom, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much of a crisis is this?" She said "A ten!" in all seriousness. "Mom, this is a 2, tops," I told her. "But we won't have any meat or any gravy or anything for leftovers!" We assured her we had plenty of food and she started calming down. I finally pulled out the "We really should be grateful for all that we do have," card and that did the trick. I couldn't help but leave the room and laugh at my mom's overreaction about a stupid turkey. However, when I think about how many holiday turkeys my mom has roasted with nary a hitch (somewhere around 90 with Christmas and Thanksgiving) I guess I can see why this would be kinda traumatic for her.

This post is so long, I'm thinking I need to break it into two. So...join me at Part II at your leisure to read about the rest of my Christmas.