It is Sunday, November 29 and there are only 26 days until Christmas.  Yes we are less than four weeks away, so I guess you can eat last year’s Peeps now.  Today we remember the birthdays of Louisa May Alcott, Carlo Levi and Kenneth D Cameron.  On this day in 1825 the first Italian opera, “Barber of Seville” was produced in the US, in 1944 Johns Hopkins hospital performed the first open heart surgery and in 1969 the Beatles’ “Come Together” went to #1.  In Albania it is Liberation Day, in Liberia it is President Tubman’s birthday and in Massachusetts it is John F Kennedy Day.

Well, Thanksgiving has come and gone.  I think that I will be ready to eat again sometime later today.  Nothing big, maybe just a turkey sandwich with mashed potatoes, gravy and stuffing.  What always amazes me is the amount of preparation that goes into the day.  The lovely Elaine and I bought our turkey last Friday.  It was, of course, hard as a rock.  In fact I think it was harder than a rock.  We immediately put it in the refrigerator to start the thawing process.  Not like the time my brother put a turkey in his sink overnight to thaw it.  We explained that he could not just leave it sitting in the sink.  He ended up throwing it out into the woods … but I digress.

We placed the turkey in a spare refrigerator in our garage and the lovely Elaine had me checking it every 20 minutes to make sure the temperature was okay and that the appliance hadn’t quit working.  It was and it hadn’t.  We (she) made our various lists for last minute shopping, night-before preparations and Thanksgiving Day cooking and serving.  On Wednesday, after reviewing the shopping list, I made my last run to the store to get what we needed.  I then spent the day baking an apple crisp and a pumpkin cheese pie.  At one point I ran out to the store for my next last run.  Both desserts came out well and I had time to get the bakeware cleaned up before I made my last last run to the grocery store.

The lovely Elaine spent part of the evening getting as much prep work done as possible so that things would go smoothly on Thursday.  Then later in the evening we brought the bird in to get it set so that the next day we could just pop it in the oven.  Who knew that five days would not be enough to completely thaw the turkey?  It took me some time, a pair of pliers and my considerable skill with profanity, but I was finally able to remove that piece of plastic that holds the legs together.  I believe that the people who put those on the bird sit around Wednesday night and Thursday morning laughing their butts off thinking about all the people struggling to remove that thing … sorry, digressing again.

After much work and near frostbite on my hands I was able to remove the neck from the cavity.  Turning the turkey around, I found and, after more struggle and profanity, removed the bag with the other parts.  Then I ran water into the turkey to clean out the inside; however, the water did not run out the other end like it usually does.  I gave the turkey a proctologic exam so that  the water could run through and then we used vegetable oil, salt and pepper inside, wrapped the bird in plastic and returned it to the refrigerator.  Based on our planned dinner time and the fact that the thing was still slightly frozen, we felt that it would be wise to have the bird in the oven by 8 AM.

We got up in the morning brought the turkey in, got the oven going, finished prepping the bird and then popped it in the oven.  One would think that that would be the end of things for a while and that we could sit, eat breakfast, drink coffee, read the paper and relax for a couple hours.  One would be wrong.  Before I even finished my first cup of coffee, the lovely Elaine had me researching whether or not it was okay to roast a frozen turkey.  According to my research, it is.  I was not too concerned because ours was more thawed than frozen, but Elaine needed reassurance.  Then it was back to my coffee and the paper.  Speaking of the paper (if I may digress one more time), there were so many ads that just the ad section was larger than the whole regular Sunday paper, including ads.  Realistically, anyone going shopping has already planned out their strategy.  These ads should have come out this past Sunday.

Anyway, once we got the turkey under way, I had a more important task.  I wanted to research the proper way to carve a turkey.  I have been carving turkeys for a numbers of years and I am certain of several things.  One is that I really do not know what I am doing.  Another is that when I carved a turkey it looked more like a botched stabbing than a nicely carved bird.  I think the only reason no one ever complained was because my attitude has always been that if you do not like how I did something, then next time you can do it.  I watched several different videos, got some great tips and actually did a decent job carving the turkey this year.  Now my only problem is remembering the techniques so I can do it again next year. 

You are probably thinking, “Come on!  Now that you did it you will remember it next time.”  You could be right, but you are also dealing with someone who goes into the kitchen to get milk for coffee, stops to clean up some dirt on the floor and then walks out without the milk.  I could write it all down, but then the problem will be remembering that I wrote it down and where I put it so that I would have it next year.  The plus side to this is that I will watch the videos again next year and it will be like a whole new experience for me.

After all was said and done, the turkey cooked nicely, I carved it well, the kids were here, we had good food, good wine, good desserts and it was a wonderful Thanksgiving.  As I said all that prep and the meal was over in less than 30 minutes.  I hope you all had a great day, too.

This week our fact tells us that the cigarette lighter was invented before the match.  The reason the match was invented was because someone must have said, “Hey what if my lighter runs out of fluid and I don’t have any handy.  I better come up with an alternative.”