The (Funny) Brochure on My Favorite Dysfunctional Thanksgiving Stories

Thanksgiving.  It’s that time of year again here in the States.  A day of thanks and football.  Today I’m sharing with you my episode from last year filled with my favorite dysfunctional Thanksgiving stories.  It’s been one of my most popular episodes!  Let’s face it, most of it is about family, and food.  But mixed in are a few other stories as well.  I guess I was always lucky that my family was close by.  I just wish we had better food!  I hope whatever you are doing this week, you are enjoying yourself, relaxing and hopefully not eating too much.  But hopefully eating GOOD food.  Leave the Jell-O mold and dry turkey behind!  Happy Thanksgiving.  There’s nothing like a dysfunctional family holiday to get the blood surging through your veins. 

In honor of Thanksgiving, I want to dedicate this episode to some of my favorite Thanksgiving stories.  In general, Thanksgiving started out as a kind of awkward holiday for us.  Well, me.  When I look back on it, and I compare it to what it could have been, I’m amazed I lived through it!  

First of all, a big part of Thanksgiving is food, right?  And I come from a long line of bad cooks.  In general, I remember we ate out. A lot. Some of the things my mom would make regularly included tater tot casserole made with canned mushroom soup, tostadas made with Fritos as the base, and other semi-horrific dishes. She seemed to choose the recipes in magazines that also advertised some high calorie product to include. If we had vegetables, they were usually covered in cheese sauce or doused in dressing.  The one healthy thing my mom insisted on was not using salt, in anything, or on anything.  (Of course this didn’t mean that we didn’t buy high sodium items!) In fact, we didn’t have salt in the house, and this was all I knew. As an adult, I discovered the wonderful taste of salt, and would enjoy sprinkling a LOT of salt on a tortilla chip at a Mexican restaurant.  Did I say sprinkled?  I actually poured it on!  Or how about popcorn at the movies. Oh, the simple joys of flavor!! 

When I was a child, we usually ate Thanksgiving at my maternal grandmother’s house, and looking back on it, this meal was a full culinary disaster. A 911.  We would eat one of the most flavorless, dry turkeys I would ever encounter (because again there was no salt and I doubt anyone in this family knew about the word “seasoning”).  Spices in our house, and my grandmother’s house consisted of bay leaves and cinnamon.  Do bay leaves actually DO that much to a dish?  Then we’d have stuffing made from a mix – Mrs. Cubbison’s with chopped celery added into it. I think there were also chopped onions.  I don’t remember eating the stuffing that much, because it just didn’t seem appealing.  There didn’t seem to be much flavor in it.  Yes, we would have salad, but it would be one made with one of the whitest heads of iceberg lettuce you could ever find. If we were lucky –  and I stress the word lucky – we had a very small tomato chopped up in there. Homemade dressing? Yes. Mayo and ketchup combined. Yummy. And the cheapest white flour rolls from the supermarket you could buy. Actually I think sometimes they were just given away free. Canned gravy. Canned green beans. Instant mashed potatoes. Are you salivating yet? It’s a wonder I ever wanted to eat again. The pumpkin pie with Cool Whip was probably the best thing about the meal. It’s no wonder I have a sweet tooth.  How could you possibly ruin a store bought pumpkin pie?  Or even a frozen one?  That would be difficult. Well, I guess you could burn the frozen one when you baked it.  I wouldn’t put it past us. I remember a lot of the time, my grandfather, we called my mom’s father Poppa, would be cooking the turkey.  I never saw him really cooking much else the rest of the year.  There must have been a reason. But seriously, my grandmother wasn’t very good in the kitchen either. She was really good at opening cans though.  

In between basting – although there probably wasn’t much of that since the turkey turned out so dry – Poppa and my dad would be watching football.  It was one of the few times per year that these two men were together.  I don’t remember them getting along too badly, or really incredibly well.  It was almost like they were strangers in the same house together.  I was either somewhere with my mom and grandmother, or I was out in the backyard, trying to get away from it all..  This is why I guess I can’t really recall any conversations between them.  I know that my parents didn’t get along too well with either set of in-laws.  I found that out later.  But when I was living through it, it just seemed like cool tolerance.  We would all sit down to the table, and my mom would always say, “We have a lot to be thankful for,” and then we would eat.  

I don’t remember really eating that much or being too full, because seriously, it wasn’t that good.  Then, for Thanksgiving dinner, we would drive over to my paternal grandparent’s house. I don’t remember there ever being a TV in this house either, so we couldn’t watch any of the holiday specials or even sports.  I had to listen to the adults talk.  These grandparents, Pappy and Grandmother (she was very formal) were both slight and thin. Pappy was the one that cooked all the time, surprisingly (I cannot recall ever seeing this grandmother even step a foot into the kitchen). Nowadays, we would probably call Pappy an alcoholic. He was always drinking and would also cook with wine or liqueur in almost everything, including the most heavily drenched rum pudding for dessert you could imagine. No pumpkin pie. Most years, he put oranges on the table with whole cloves stuck in them for decoration. One year, I tried to eat one, thinking that it was really cinnamon, I was overwhelmed by the taste of the cloves. The whole experience was too much for the palate of a 10 year old. Just looking for a happy medium, somewhere. Going from cardboard to drunk gourmet.  To say the holidays were an eating disappoint is an understatement. Christmas meals were about the same as Thanksgiving, except there were presents. Luckily for New Years, we usually stayed at home when I was a child and ordered Chinese takeout! 

Imagine how giddy I was when as an adult I was finally invited to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving who was a good cook! Or went to a restaurant for the holiday!  After years of holiday food suffering, it was like a miracle!  Fresh food! Full flavor! You actually wanted to ask for seconds!  And I finally discovered I liked stuffing!  Good stuffing that is. Who knew?  

Now because the food was always such a treat at my house, and because the company was also so scintillating, one year I decided on my own to go down to the Skid Row area of Downtown LA and help serve Thanksgiving dinner to the homeless.  I signed up at one of the Missions – the Fred Jordan Mission to be exact.  I was in college, and when I told my mom I was surprised that she really had no idea WHY I wanted to do this. She was confused, frustrated, a little bit angry even.  I was like, where did this reaction come from?  My parents, but especially my mom, were some of the original co-dependents.  They would often go out of their way to do for others.  Why was this so confusing to her?  I guess I was starting to realize in part my place in the world.  I talked to my mom about how I hoped she would be proud of me for volunteering, not ashamed or upset. I would be back in plenty of time to eat dinner with them.  When I was leaving the house that morning, my mom was overly enthusiastic and I think trying to overcompensate for her initial reaction.  She told me how proud she was of me, and what a good thing I was doing.  Honestly, it felt unnatural, it felt contrived, but I went with it.  Well, the joke was kind of on me, because the mission I went to had so many volunteers they really didn’t need me.  I stood around a lot, and only had a few place settings to be responsible for.  It was fairly lively because they had a stage and musical performers, etc., but you would have to wait for a guest to finish eating and then clear the place and serve another guest. It went really slow.  They had hundreds of people show up to eat, but also hundreds of volunteers.  I must have looked pretty bored or something because even Willie Jordan, who was Fred Jordan’s wife, came over and said she felt so bad for me.  That I looked sad.  I wasn’t sure exactly what I was supposed to look like.  I was bored and tired of standing.  I also didn’t feel that I was being useful.  It was one of my first real volunteer experiences.  

When I had my store, I was closed that day of course to observe the holiday, but I used the day to get ready for Christmas.  I didn’t want to start putting out holiday decorations too early.  So, on Thanksgiving I made the wreath that hung in the store.  Using branches from the redwood tree in our front yard, I crafted a big wreath.  It was at least three feet wide.  In place of a tree, it smelled good for quite a while.  It smelled like a Christmas tree. 

Then there’s the Thanksgiving story that I always used in job interviews. It never failed to impress my perspective employers. I was working for a fundraising consulting firm about 30 miles away from my house. With the LA traffic this sometimes meant it took me two hours to get home.  We worked on a lot of public funding proposals for our clients. I talked about this in my last episode about becoming a fundraiser.  Well, that seemed to be one of the main things that the junior associates like myself seemed to work on the most. Anyway this one Thanksgiving our firm was working on the same proposal for two different clients. It was quite a lengthy proposal. If you’re familiar with public funding proposals, they consist of many, many forms. There’s nothing wrong with government entities except that there’s usually a lot of forms and a lot of questions that go along with anything done by the government. Think about your tax returns. Then there are also the narrative questions which need to be completed. My boss at the time Victoria was great at what she did and I learned a lot from her. She was also very meticulous and everything that she did for her clients was very exacting.  I mean it was no wonder that she was successful. She was working on the proposal for one of her clients and I was working on the same proposal for another client. It was the night before Thanksgiving. I’m not sure exactly when the due date was but I think it was sometime that weekend or maybe the next Monday. We had email, but submissions still had to be in hardcopy form. And the hardcopy submissions had to be there in their hands by Monday.  

I remember that there was just SO much work.  We were both doing the best we could but it got to be pretty late.  Like after midnight.  We were both so tired.  Since we still had work to do and I was so far from home, we decided I would go with her to her house and take a nap there, and then come back with her in the morning – in the morning, it was the morning - and finish.  

So, yes, we went to her condo and for some reason I ended up sleeping in her dining room on the floor?  I don’t really remember, but I guess she didn’t have a long enough sofa?  I remember thinking, “Oh My God….what am I doing?”  But again, you do what you had to do for the client.  Right? When it started to get light, we got up and went back to the office to finish.  Then I was finally on my way back home.  That time of day, luckily, there wasn’t much traffic. That was a plus.  It was about 7am.  I’m just not a morning person, so this was pretty nasty. So early.  So bright.  Yuck.  

Bill and I had recently moved to a larger one bedroom apartment from a studio apartment, and now I had a full kitchen in which to cook.  I had already bought the turkey and all the trimmings.  I had been ambitious enough to sign up for cooking a full Thanksgiving meal for my then boyfriend Bill and his brother.  Well, at least I was up early and could get the turkey in the oven.  Right?  

I had already struggled with the turkey.  Just dealing with the turkey.  I’m not a vegetarian, but I still to this day am not too thrilled about handling and cooking any kind of raw meat.  I’m a bit queasy about it all.  I felt like I had a body in the refrigerator.  Now I had to read the directions.  Open the wrapper.  Wash the bird and then pull the things out of the cavity?  Are they serious?  Who thought of this?  Do we really NEED a turkey neck?  Good grief!  It’s a slightly horrifying idea.  I felt like a serial killer dealing with the parts of my victim. Is this really what people DO every year? But I managed to get the body in the roasting pan – the body! - and then in the oven.  THEN I realized that I had forgotten to buy the green beans. I wanted to pretty much kill myself by now.  But yes, I got back in the car and drove over to the market and miraculously they still had some fresh green beans, and then I went home and crashed into bed.  I remember standing in line at the market to pay, thinking, “Is this what people do when they make Thanksgiving dinner?”  Again, like the freeway, at least it wasn’t crowded.  Who was going to be at the market at 8am on Thanksgiving morning?  Only the losers like me who forgot to buy something for their meals.  

One of the more disappointing parts about Thanksgiving is how going to the market for a quick trip turns into a logistical nightmare close to the holidays.  Since we have a horse, I need to buy carrots every three to four days for him.  I don’t want to show up at the barn, believe me, without carrots.  But before Thanksgiving you can’t just drop in and buy carrots.  You have to dedicate an hour to it.  There should be an express aisle for people who just forgot to buy one or two items.  Even parking is a nightmare.  It’s like going to the mall before Christmas.  I mean, people eat all year long.  Why is it so buy at Thanksgiving?  

When I woke up that day, after staying up all night working, the last challenge I had was just making gravy.  I really didn’t know what I was doing.  I wanted to try to make it from scratch.  You know, flour and all.  Now I was understanding why canned gravy was such an attractive thing.  I managed to put something together, but I’m not sure it was really what you would call a culinary masterpiece.  Still, I think I did better than my grandparents.  The story about working into Thanksgiving went over very well with all of my future job interviews, I can tell you that.  

This year I’m buying stuff to heat up.  Smoked turkey breast.  Sides.  It’s still a lot of work.  It’s still BUYING things at a time when everyone else in the world decides they also want to buy the same things.  And because I’m just that weird, I like to try to make ONE dish.  This year I might try to make a Brussel sprout side dish.  That would be huge for me.  Cooking anything is huge for me.  Remember, I come from that long line of bad cooks?  It’s not in my genes.  And then there’s the scheduling of baking the frozen pie because I can do pretty well with that, along with the biscuits.  The ones that pop out at you.  But yes, my biggest nightmare is that I’ll have a ton of dirty dishes and no dishwasher.  Our house being built in the Jurassic period has counters that I’ve learned are too narrow to house a dishwasher.  Things were just smaller back in the 40s I guess.  

I want to wish each of you a very happy Thanksgiving.  No matter who we are, we always have a lot to be thankful for.  I’m thankful for each day, for my husband, my animals, and the ability to do the things that I want to do.  Take care everybody.  Every day is such a gift.  

If you liked this episode, please follow the Only Child Diaries podcast on Apple Podcasts or other platforms you might listen. And consider rating Only Child Diaries and writing a review. It helps others to find us. Please share it with a friend you think might like it as well. Visit my Instagram page @OnlyChildDiaries or Facebook @OnlyChildDiariespodcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Tracy Wallace. And these are the Only Child Diaries.