Winner Winner Turkey Dinner

Another Thanksgiving.

Almost every Thanksgiving that we host has an issue of an unfortunate incident.

One year, when the kids were little, and we were in a small apartment, we had a long table in the living room and dining room combo. One of the kids, I forget which one, decided to throw up on the carpet where the table would go. The smell was horrible and intense. Guests would be arriving in a few hours.

Now I have to say apartment carpeting isn't the best to begin with. Forty years ago we didn't happen to own a shampooer. Need I say more? We scrubbed and put everything known to man on that carpet to get rid of that awful smell. We finally settled on a throw rug and proceeded to set-up the table over it.

Onto the next Thanksgiving crisis. How about the kitchen sink being clogged the day of holiday? The water was so high it was about to start spilling over onto the floor in the kitchen. 

Did you ever try to get a plumber out on Thanksgiving before company was coming? That was when we were in a two-story apartment with only one bathroom, and it was upstairs. So we schlepped our dirty dishes up a flight of stairs to the only bathroom we had. You don't know what fun it is to fill the bathtub with dirty dishes and then bend over to try to wash them. My back has never been the same!

Fast forward 30 years at least and we are in a big house. The kids are grown and the plumbing working. What could possibly happen?

I just decided we were going to buy a fresh turkey, twice the price of the frozen ones. The turkey is in the oven, browning and smelling wonderful, and I'm running around trying to get the house straightened up, table set, vacuumed etc.

I pulled the turkey out of the oven intermittently just to douse it with butter spray so could it could be nice and brown when we put it on the table.

In my stressed out haste I sprayed the turkey with what I thought was the can of butter spray, turned out it was a can of Pledge!

The turkey quickly went into the trashcan. I hope the trash men did not decide to chow down on that bird that looked so wonderful but was so poisonous. I thought of my mother telling me that they were children starving all over the world!

My wonderful son is in the grocery business. He also loves Thanksgiving, so he rushed out to the store and found another fresh turkey.

Thank goodness I had made the turkey the day before so I had another crack at it.

Cans of Pledge were taken away from me to make sure I didn't repeat that again.

I informed my husband and my son that they were sworn to secrecy. If this became common knowledge no one would ever eat at our house again ever.

Plus my other son would put me on the list for Delmar Gardens Nursing Home I'm sure.

Thanksgiving at our house is one week away so pray for us!

This year I'm buying the turkey cooked and done. Which reminds me of another Thanksgiving fiasco. The first time I bought a prepared cooked turkey I didn't realize it had to cook for two hours before you served it. So needless to say that Thanksgiving we ate pretty late.

Any suggestions from my readers as to how to get my Thanksgiving off and running without a disaster?  I'm open to all suggestions.  And, no I don't like to eat out on Thanksgiving.