Dinner: perfect. This year I had the butcher cut up the turkey. From the scraps, I made stock a day in advance. The breast, legs, thighs, I brined overnight in salt and citrus and bay leaf.
I roasted it Thanksgiving morning with lemon, olive oil, salt and pepper, with veggies in the pan. I made gravy with pan drippings and stock. The result — succulent, with a wild gaminess.
I selected a luxury of mushrooms at Whole Foods, roasted them, added them to toasted cubes of artisan bread, onions, sage, celery. More stock, turkey fat, fresh herbs. Beaten egg. Wrapped tightly in foil and baked until soft and buttery and rich.
Fluffy russet potatoes pressed through the ricer, butter, cream. Butternut squash with maple and salt and pepper. Green beans, crisp piles of them with garlic and salt and pepper and lemon.
Cranberry sauce that Sunbeam says tastes like Thanksgiving all by itself: rosemary, ginger, carmelized onion.
Set out on the table on the fine china. Light from Ducky’s mother’s candle sticks. Purple, cream and crimson blossoms in silver cups.
Shining faces at my table: my daughters, my husband, Aunt Emily and her beautiful boys. It was the best Thanksgiving meal ever, they said, and I grinned, pleased.
We ate and drank cider and wine and told the old stories and some new ones.
Bounty.
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A Karoke machine, a belated joint birthday gift to Mare and Ren from Luke and Matt. It came with two microphones.
They spent the day after Thanksgiving lying around in pajamas eating pie and singing Hannah Montana duets. I know there are great places to go in the world, and some day would like my girls to see them. But I don’t know that there’s any greater happiness than that.
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Cousin Emma has come for Thanksgiving Sunday. She is six months older than Ren. I set out some Foam Crap They Can Glue Together For a Good Solid 20 Minutes.
“I don’t mind if anyone wants to copy me,” Mare says. Emma nods in happy older-cousin adoration. They settle in with glue sticks for a good long chat.
“… Snow Queens are better than princesses,” we overhear Mare saying later, “not like the Fairies of Spring. Emma, you can be the Starlight Fairy, if you want. And help us bring back the Happiness of Blossoms.”
“Okay!!” says Emma.
“Holy shit,” says Cute Husband.
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This was supposed to be an awesome Christmas card shot
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A new routine: at night, before bed, I check in with my middle girl. The one with the fierce nature and gentle heart who sometimes gets lost between her sisters The Star and The Baby.
“How are you, Ren?” I ask. “How are you feeling? Anything you want to talk to me about?”
“Well, Momma,” she begins, and I know it’s going to be a long one. “I was sad today because Mare and Emma didn’t do what I wanted.”
“Yes,” I say. “I noticed that. It was hard because Emma is your age, but a guest, and Mare was paying her lots of attention.”
“Yeah,” Ren said. “And then? When I cried and ran away? They didn’t even follow me!”
“Oh,” I say, “no one follows you when you run away crying. That’s just the rule.”
“Seriously?” Shock.
“Yeah.”
“For real?”
“Yep.”
“Wow. Maybe I better stay and talk to them, then.”
“Yeah, that might be better,” I say. “And you can always ask me to help if you are having trouble understanding each other.”
“Wow. Okay, yeah, let’s try that.”
###
“Momma, I know I am a good puncher,” Ren says in our nightly chat.
“You are,” I agree.
“And if a bad guy came near Eden I would kill him,” she continues matter-of-factly. “I would punch him until he was dead.”
“Right,” I say.
“But that’s not a good thing for me to do at school, right?”
“Right,” I agree.
“Seamus was annoying me today and I knew I could not punch him, but he wouldn’t stop. He got up near me and I said, ‘STOP!’ and he wouldn’t so you know what I did?”
“Um. What?”
“I said:” she takes a deep breath, puts her face close to mine, and screams.
Then she settles back against the pillows.
“How did that work?” I ask, catching my breath.
“Oh, it was awesome, he totally went away.”
###
I ate pie. I tackled it with a fork. At night, it called to me and I wandered down and had at, ending with a glass of cold milk before padding back to bed and tucking in beside Eden. She nursed hungily and I stroked her back and marveled at full bellies and the scent of baby shampoo.
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“AAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!” Ren said. Sleeping Beauty said hello, nice to meet you, and then painted Ren’s nails.
I started this time by dousing it in pink. I hung pink ribbons from the chandelier, and I spread out pink puffy glitter stickers. I tied a pink balloon to each chair. Here, the girls could decorate a foam initial with the foamy stickers. This is a great activity for four year olds, who have just mastered the art of removing sticker backings and can be meticulous in planning their designs.
We stumbled on the children’s theater workshop last summer, and saw that they did birthday parties.
The day before the party, I started on the cake. This ended up being more of a production than I wanted it to be. I decided to make a square using the one rectangular pan I had. But the pan really needed a double batch of batter to fill, but I didn’t figure that out until about halfway through so I ended up having to bake four cakes: Two chocolate, two vanilla, which I glued together with buttercream. For fun, I added pink food coloring to the vanilla one.
The kids came in one at a time, in boas and sunglasses, to walk the red carpet. We clapped and took pictures and then watched the video on the overhead screen.
