Martha Stuart falls from grace...

Today we went to my mom's house for my family's Thanksgiving dinner. She lives about 45 minutes north of us. The whole family had planned to be there. My Aunt and Uncle, their 2 kids with their families, plus my Grandma came up from The Dalles (about 1 1/2 hour away). We were going to eat AT noon. No exceptions!~

Ok, let me just give a little background here. If you know my Mom, you'll get just how great this all is. My mom is all about etiquette and protocol when it comes to these kinds of events. We arrive at a set time...and we certainly ALWAYS eat on time. She painstakingly plans out all details. Agonizes over whether there are enough matching linens for all of the guests. If not arrangements need to be made. Mis match anything is defiantly unacceptable. You get the idea. It's a formal attitude, but a pretty informal setting. It's all very confusing.

So skip back to today....We arrive at 10:45. Now we're eating at 12. Thats the plan anyways. We get there and realize we may need to run to the store. As soon as we get there, mom is freaking out. She put the turkey in at 7 AM and it's barely even warm. It turns out her oven picked today as the day to slowly die. Perfect timing. She is a little panicked that we won't eat at noon, but we reassure her that it's no big deal. Things happen.

So we decide to run to the store while the bird cooks a little more. While at the store we had the slowest checkout people on planet earth. One of them cut their finger on some cardboard while they were checking us out. She actually stopped in the middle of ringing us up to go in search of a band aid. We just sort of stood there looking at each other and blinking. She found one, came back and finished ringing us up. It was the weirdest thing. Needless to say we ended up taking longer at the store than we wanted. In the midst of this...I call my mom to let her know what was going on. She was sounding really panicked at this point as more people showed up, but the turkey still wasn't ready. By now it's about 1:00.

So we get back to her house about 1:30 and she is in a full blown freak out. She has taken the bird out of the oven and instead, put a full "bone in" ham, in the hopes that maybe we could just sort of re heat the precooked ham and call it good. We could at least get the show on the road. We started in on side dishes and the ham came out of the oven around 2 ish. As soon as the ham came out, the turkey went back in to try to salvage what we could out of it.

What was funny was all in all, it really wasn't that big of a deal. We all sat around and talked and had a great afternoon. I got to spend time with cousins that I only get to see once a year. I also got to spend time with my grandma. Which I never get to see my grandma but once a year or so.

So finally, about 3:30 the turkey was done. My mom goes to pull it out of the oven.....and SPLASH!!!!! The pan slipped out of her hands and all the juice and grease and anything else that collects at the bottom of a turkey pan went all over her kitchen floor. At this moment I was having a hard time holding my giggles in. She just gave me the "stink eye" and said "This is the last year I do this at my house!!!!!"

All I could say at that moment...."I am soooo blogging about this!!!"

I wrote about this elegant disaster of a holiday meal not to embarrass her, but to let her know that the end result was the same whether everything went as planned, or went drastically off course. We all spent the afternoon together as a family enjoying each other's company.

Plus I included some pictured of our day. I got some pictures of the kids and their cousins plus one of 4 generations .

It was a good day.