"Here I am 5 o’clock in the morning stuffing bread crumbs up a dead bird’s butt."

For years, I had a thanksgiving tradition with my Mom. We woke up and cooked the turkey (usually large enough to serve 18 people) while we watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Later in the afternoon, our family would begin arriving, each member carrying a dish or a dessert that they had prepared specifically for our feast. I remember as a child thinking that all these dishes (string bean casseroles, sweet potato pie, jello molds, cobbler, etc.) must have been difficult to prepare and that they’d spent hours in the kitchen slaving away over their delicious perfections. I mean, hell, the turkey itself took two hours to prepare and four hours to cook.

But this year it is a little bit different. There are five of us at the table. And the turkey – it’s not even a turkey. It’s just the breast. It took half the time to cook and prepare. But it’s not the size of the turkey or the number of guests at our table that caused a stir; it is that this year, I helped prepare the other dishes – the dishes that up until now I believed my relatives slaved away over a stove all day making. And what really shocked me (and I say this as comically as I possibly can), is how wrong my expectations had been. I must have had a lot of faith in my family to actually expect them to spend hours “slaving” over a stove. I suppose I should have known my family doesn’t “slave.” More importantly, I probably should have expected that everything they make in the kitchen would have taken as little effort as possible.

The jello mold took ten minutes, the string bean casserole took twenty, my mother bought dessert from the bakery, and my Nana’s sweet potato pie – a dish that to me was the most anticipated, most delicious, and most yearned after to learn how to prepare – was the easiest of them all. Nana once joked with me that a sweet potato pie took three hours to make because she had to peel the potatoes, soak them to make them soft, slice up the pineapple and then mix them up all together. Turns out her biggest secret is that it took twenty minutes to make. And she didn’t peel potatoes, soak ‘em, and slice up the pineapples. She bought cans!! And all we had to do was open them, pour them into a big bowl, mash them up, and put them into a casserole dish. That was it! The most time consuming part was the mashing! And don’t you know Nana would kill me if she knew I was giving away her secret.

I think what disappoints me the most (and again, I say this comically), is the way my imagination far exceeded reality when it came to Thanksgiving and my family’s effort. It was like being a little girl with dreams that one day I’d host a Thanksgiving dinner, spend all day cooking and knowing that my family was doing the same, thus making our impending feast that much more rewarding, turned into a harsh reality that I could probably cook the whole damn dinner by myself and not even break a sweat.

Regardless, I suppose I can be relieved that as a girl who is more likely to burn down the kitchen than produce anything edible, contributing (or better yet, hosting) my own Thanksgiving meal down the road may not be as farfetched as I had previously imagined. Somehow, I’m able to bake gooey cookies, chewy brownies, and make a wicked macaroni and cheese, so perhaps the skill level needed to produce our family’s traditional Thanksgiving meal is within my range. Instead of being disappointed in the lack of effort needed, I should be grateful. After all, this is a holiday in which you count your blessings. So here is to a simple Thanksgiving with simple dishes, and going forward, very simple expectations.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Choice and Consequence: Your Malicious Discontent

Here’s the thing about idle gossip – It’s childish. Never mind the fact that the “holy book” tells you not to do it, it just makes you look bad. When you partake in spreading gossip, you lend proof to the dissatisfaction of your life. You’re telling the world that your life and your ideas are of little worth to you or anyone else, and you’ve got nothing better to do than talk about something that is none of your concern.

A few things happen the moment you decide to open your mouth and share the juice, so to speak. First, you give everyone a reason not to trust you. Why would anyone tell you their secrets when they know you’re the kind of person who is going to turn around and tell everyone else you know? You instantly become the one everyone looks over his or her shoulders for. All conversation grinds to a halt when you enter the room. Second, you lose all your creditability. Have you ever played the “Telephone Game?” It’s a child’s game, where one person whispers one thing in someone else’s ear, then that person whispers what they heard into another’s ear, and so on and so forth. By the time the last person gets the message, it’s so morphed from its original form that everyone laughs and wonders how they got it so wrong. The same thing happens with gossip, but it’s not as funny. It’s a crueler version of the game that we play, and the person about whom we’re discussing ends up hurt. So now, not only do you, the gossiper, look like a lying fool, but you look like an ass too. Lastly, when you talk, your good name dies and you shrink. Forget walking tall. You’re the kind of person who’s got nothing to be proud of, unless you’re okay looking like an imbecile.

Eleanor Roosevelt once quoted, "Great mind discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” So the next time you decide to open your mouth and spread that juicy, malicious gossip, consider this: you are the image you create of yourself. Talk, and give everyone a reason to skirt around you like you’re a poisonous plant. What goes around comes around. And the next time you need a shoulder to lean on (because that time will one day come), you’ll have two choices. You can hope and pray that the person you confide in will not take your story to the papers. You can hope and pray that your misfortunes will not the next topic on everyone’s lips. You can hope and pray, in vain, that you will be pitied and not preyed upon. Or, you can suffer. Alone.