Thanksgiving for Dummies

OK. I admit it.  I am a 34 year old woman, living in America (with a family)  and have never cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner in my life. Never. Not once. There are lots of reasons for this anomaly: travel, shared Thanksgivings with friends, and, of course, Hubby Tim who moonlights as my personal chef (go ahead and be jealous for a minute ladies, it's totally appropriate). I have silently relished the knowledge that I have somehow gotten out of cooking this monster meal alone; Breathed a sigh of relief that the stars had aligned just so, so that I was only responsible for side dishes. Well, my number was bound to come up sooner or later. *sigh* I have family flying in, friends coming over, and Hubby Tim is in Wisconsin...the perfect storm of my Thanksgiving nightmares. This one's alllllll me and seems like a relatively poor idea.

 There are two issues that are keeping me up at night:

Up until recently, I knew almost nothing about turkeys. I happily eat them exactly once a year and if I happen to see one that is alive, I get survivor's guilt. That's was about the extent of my knowledge. So, imagine my surprise to find out that in order for this meal to go smoothly, I have to give one a nice aromatic bath, tie it up, and then shove things in it's nether-regions. (Whaaaaa?!! Do I need to get it liquored up and throw candles in for good measure?!) Frankly, I like to get to know someone a little bit better before I go down that road (no, really mom, I do).

As if the that wasn't enough to give me performance anxiety,  I found out that there is a whole hotline specifically for people to call in the case of a butterball emergency (No shit...a Butterball Hotline AND a butterball emergency...both apparently real things).  I'm putting it on speed dial right next to the AA hotline that I'll be calling from drinking too much over the stress of this whole thing.

Here's the other potential issue: These days, I seem to have the focus of someone with dementia and an added touch of ADD. I'll start something, walk into another room, and then totally forget that I had been doing something else (As if to prove my point, in the middle of writing this very blog, I walked upstairs to get my phone and realized that I had food burning on the stove...). I'm relatively certain that preparing Thanksgiving dinner requires timing and focus, both of which I seem to have misplaced somewhere in the craziness that is my life.

Now, this whole Thanksgiving thing doesn't need to be a Martha Stewart production, but I just hope it isn't this either:



Oh boy. Wish me luck.