An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving (Cigar Smoke 12-4-08)

I’ve always enjoyed Thanksgiving. I think it’s the best holiday of the year. You gather with your family and friends and the women do all the work and you just eat and watch football and rough up the kids a little and complain about getting fat. It’s perfect.

This year it was a little more perfect than usual. We all decided to chip in and bring various dishes so the little hostess woman of the house wouldn’t break down and cry at the end of the day. Somebody brought a great salad and this nifty bean dish with nuts and sliced almonds, and somebody else brought an incredible yam dish with three — count ’em, three — different color yams. I’m not kidding. Regular orange yams, and then white yams and purple yams. Three layers of colored yams topped off with a layer of oven-toasted marshmallows. And someone else brought an eggnog/pumpkin pie. You could hear the calories. And because I am what? I am a health addict. I brought the box of See’s Candy.

All in all, we had 12 people in the house. Plus three dogs. Our good dog, Hadley, and two rat-yappy dogs. They got along pretty well. The two yappers literally did vertical jumps right onto unsuspecting laps. They were like Air Force test planes taking off with no runway. Just straight up into the wild blue lap yonder. And Hadley, the good dog, was so tired from all the damn fun that he collapsed right in the pathway from the kitchen to the family room, and he just laid there like a canine corpse and we used him as an obstacle course all day.

Because we weren’t sure if we would get enough to eat, we started out with a few appetizers. Had some greasy salt-plastered garlic potato chips for the men, and had these Whole Foods chips made out of recycled whole-grain blue-flour tortillas from some adobe hut in some village in Guatemala for the women, and we dipped those gender- specific babies into some unisex humus. Some good eatin’ there.

Nobody got stomach cramps so we had some pistachio nuts in a giant bowl where we would just throw the empty shells back into the same bowl because some unnamed member of the family thought that the search for the next pistachio nut was “more challenging and thus more rewarding” than just picking out a pistachio from a non-shelled bowl. That person may be finding out soon what the singles scene is like.

Then somebody (probably a commie from my wife’s side of the family) brought out a platter of vegetables. Carrots and broccoli and cucumbers and celery sticks all arranged around some white loser glob of congealed crud that the humus just laughed at. All the guys tried to make the kids eat this stuff. Because we were good parents and good grandparents and because healthy children were our lives — and because some of the kids had come dangerously close to reaching into our garlic chip bag.

Then it was time to carve the turkey. And as you might expect, I am the official turkey carver for the Laris-Wood clan. I have been carving the turkey for approximately 47 years now. I think I do a pretty damn good job of it, especially now that I don’t use a live turkey. Some of those turkey screams in past years were heartbreaking.

We had a great meal! It would have made the Pilgrims proud that they had lied to the Indians and stolen their land. It was that good. Just a fantastic meal. All the regular stuff — turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, the three-layered yam-marshmallow deal, green beans, homemade cranberry sauce, flakey-ass rolls, salad and something I’m forgetting. Oh yeah, the gravy. It was almost liquid this year. That spread could have fed Haiti for maybe a week.

So, after feeling guilty for a minute or two, we went back into the family room to watch our third lousy football game of the day. Detroit got wiped out in the morning, Dallas made fun of whatever a Seahawk is in the afternoon and Texas pretty much horn-hooked Texas A&M until they agreed not to use abbreviations for their school name. It was ugly. Three really bad football games for the men of America. If Bush was still president, I know this wouldn’t have happened.

With no more football to watch, we helped each other up from the sofas and waddled out to the kitchen counter for some pie. Because of the bad economy, we only had four kinds of pie to choose from — apple, pumpkin, pecan and eggnog/pumpkin. And I think they would have been pretty good to eat, too. If the “incident” hadn’t occurred.

OK, maybe I had a little too much to drink. It’s hazy, but I think I recall somebody giving me one of those pissy little energy drinks and maybe I added a little Johnny Walker energy of my own to it. And yes, maybe this happened more than once.

Anyway, all I can remember is one of my sons having this panicked look on his face, and loudly saying, “Dad, put down the automatic knife. You don’t carve pie!” And then everything went dark.

Can’t wait until Christmas.

Jim Laris is the former owner and publisher of the Pasadena Weekly. Contact him at jimlaris@mac.com