AnonymousCoworker

If you haven’t gathered from prior posts, my family is pretty much completely bonkers. They’re great, and I love them, don’t get me wrong, but like many people, when I turn and objectively look at my family like an outsider might, all I see is balls-outside-of-pants crazy.

For example, my family (and by “family” I mean my dad, mom, her parents, and her six brothers and sisters, their spouses, and their children (my 12 or 14 or 16 cousins or whatever), as well as the 3 or 4 great-grandchildren) is rabidly insistent on getting together. Memorial Day, Labor Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. These all require an event that commands no less than the total attendance of the entire extended family. Days like St. Patrick’s and Valentines have fallen by the wayside now that almost all of the cousins have gotten old enough to drink and bone their significant others. But every other holiday requires compulsory attendance. I guess we could opt to just not go to some of these events, but then you have hear about it until the next year. If I missed Thanksgiving, I’d be hounded about it until the next Thanksgiving. It’s ridiculous. In fact, the craziest part is that my relatives are only interested in having everyone in the same house. Once we’re all there most of them could really give a shit about the other people in the room. It’s really bizarre.

So now it should come as no surprise to you to learn that my nuclear family celebrates a pre-Thanksgiving every year on the weekend before Thanksgiving at my mother’s behest. This is a relatively new tradition, started once we were all old enough to drive and were invited to Thanksgivings of friends and girlfriends. Because my mother wouldn’t be able to see us ALL DAY on Thanksgiving, she had to get her extra time in with a pre-Thanksgiving. So now the three sons, wives in tow, dutifully participate in pre-Thanksgiving with my parents. My grandparents are usually there too, because: hey, why not?

We have this miniature Thanksgiving with all the same traditions, but with a much smaller crowd, and a much more skewed age distribution. There are six people between 25 and 30, four people between 59 and 90, and one person below 3. And of course we have to keep the 2-year-old entertained because she’s the only one that needs entertaining. Everyone else is not giving a shit that anyone else is there.

And we finally come to why I started writing this post in the first place. Saturday night found me sitting under a circular card table set up in the living room for four unlucky people to be exiled during dinner, playing “dishes” with my niece. “Dishes” primarily consists of taking all the play dishes in the “dishes” bag and dumping those play dishes all over the floor, refilling the bag, and repeating. I wasn’t going to have any of that bullshit, especially not from someone much smaller and stupider than me, so I used my superior intellect to convince my niece that we should be making food. We took cups, plates, and bowls of imaginary ingredients and dumped them into a tin, shook the empty tin, and then my niece delivered the “food” to someone else in the room.

The process wasn’t without problems though. When we were making pizza and I was dumping in the flour, oil, water, sauce, and cheese, I asked my niece what she wanted on the pizza.

“Cookies.”

Despite this being a repulsive and disgusting pizza topping, I obliged, “Okay, we’ll have cookie pizza. What else do you want?”

“Cookes.”

“Right. Yes. There are cookies on the pizza. What other toppings should we add?”

“Pizza.”

“(sigh) I’m pretty sure that you’re not quite clear on the concept here, so I’ll pretend you didn’t say that. Any other normal toppings?”

“Juice.”

“No. We’re not putting juice on pizza. That’s gross. And messy. We’ll just have your terrible cookie pizza with extra cookies.”

“Pizza!”

“Right, yes, pizza. If you can even call it that anymore.”

I sent my niece off to deliver the cookie pizza to some oblivious guinea pig who’d have to ingest the unpalatable slop. Moments later she returned, empty tin held out in her tiny hands. “More.”

I decided pizza was out of the question because of how badly she ruined it last time, so I suggested we make cookies instead. It seemed like that’s what she wanted to make anyway. I dutifully went about adding the imaginary flour, sugar, water, eggs, crisco, and chocolate chips. She had, in the meantime, found a small truck and was pushing it around my kitchen, basically violating every health department restriction in the process. Then she told me the truck wanted to watch what we were doing. She’s clearly insane, and now I had her stuck in my kitchen. What a nightmare. I put my attention back to my cookies lest she suggest that the truck needed to empty it’s diesel bladder into my gastronomic opus when I heard the voice of one of her parents, outside the confines of the tiny kitchen under the table.

“Are you making cookies down there?”

I looked at my niece, who was now pushing her truck through a flan I had set aside for dessert, turned my head toward the voice and said, “She’s not doing a goddamned thing! I’m doing all the work down here!”

They laughed, oh how they laughed, but I was the one laughing when I put the flan in the empty tin and sent it out to be eaten, delivered by a tiny malevolent sadist.