Hullo, Stranger

So, I haven't been around for the past few days. Hope your holidays were lovely! We had a bit of Thanksgiving Fiasco to go with our turkey. It was interesting.

See, my mother didn't really want to put the time, effort, and funding into making a Thanksgiving Feast with all of the trimmings. I can understand this. She works hard. Cooking is time consuming and expensive. We good naturedly call holidays "the curse of the vagina" because she and I clean the kitchen repeatedly, load the dishwasher, grate cheese, put food away, clean turkey carcasses' of all the leftover bits of meat, peel and boil potatoes, make special desserts we know my grandparents would like, etc, etc, etc. whilst the men folk play with children and watch football and game shows. You know what it takes to make Thanksgiving. My grandparents, her in-laws, come every year for Thanksgiving, so we always have out-of-town guests.

So, this year, my brave mother says: No More. Not THIS year. And decides to order Thanksgiving from the local gourmet grocer. This feast includes a turkey, and a ham. Green Bean casserole, candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, two kinds of rolls, on and on and on. She is not working this year. So, I make a few obligatory holiday desserts (no bake cookies and orange jello yumminess - sounds weird, I know.) Honey does a bang-up job on the pumpkin pie. We tromp over to Mama's for Thanksgiving. It is getting close to noon and everyone is getting peckish. She and I pop ourselves into the car and scoot over to the gourmet grocer, we pull into the parking lot...

The store is closed.

We press our not-so-dirty noses to the plate glass, doing our best Oliver impression...there is no one here. She had ordered the dinner over a week ahead of time. Proceed to mother-freak out. She is huffing and puffing. Can't understand. Why isn't the store open. Is there a sign? Gah! Where is the sign. Is that a person in there? *Press noses to glass once more*

I finally got her to concede that what we needed to do was go back to the house and call the store. Short of giving her a paper bag to breathe into, I calmly talked her off of her mental ledge while we were driving back. She had to be upset then, because she couldn't very well go back to all the hungry people and be upset. So, we call the store and miracle of miracles, someone answers!

Some guy: Gourmet Grocer
Me: Thank God! Are you open???
Some guy: No, we are closed today.
Me: But we ordered Thanksgiving Dinner from you guys over a week ago. How are we supposed to get it???
Some guy: Oh, you were supposed to pick that up yesterday.
Me: But Thanksgiving is TODAY!!!! Don't you think that someone should have told us that when you order Thanksgiving Dinner from Fancy Gourmet Grocer, you don't actually get Fresh Food, you have to pick it up the day before and have LEFTOVERS for Thanksgiving?!?!?!
Some guy: *silence*
Some guy: You didn't pay for it, did you?
Me:No! We we supposed to pay when we picked it up!
Some guy: Well, Have a nice day.
Me: *Hangs up on Thanksgiving-ruining-bastard guy*

So. We run to the regular grocery story, buy the most thawed turkey we can find and run home and cook our asses off for the next 4 hours. In the end, we had a nice Thanksgiving. I think we learned a pretty good lesson. There are no short cuts! Holidays are work! Deal!

Hope your Thanksgiving was lovely.