Just what Was Planned

Christmas has been a fun family time of the year for Maggie and I. Maggie is my spouse and we have been together for 37 thousand years or so according to the carbon dating done on items lodged behind our dryer. Our family of three grown kids; Melanie, Meghan and Aaron, has usually shown up with their significant others and we have had a big meal at our house on Christmas. This year the kids wanted to do things differently.To make things easier on us and Meghan the Christmas meal was moved to Meghan's house on the day after Christmas. We wouldn't have to cook and clean-up and Meghan's children could be at their own house all Christmas day. Incidentally, Meghan is our current leader in grandchildren with a score of 4-0-0. Melanie and Aaron seem to be normal though lacking in knowledge about tax deductions.

So Maggie and I were going to have a laid back Christmas this year. Our kids planned it that way. They were going to cook the meal at Meghan's house on the day after Christmas, so we had Christmas all to ourselves. We had an unstructured, unplanned, unsupervised Christmas day by ourselves.

In the thirty-seven years that Maggie and I have been together we have usually had a very busy day on Christmas. To begin the day I'd get up early and get the bird ready to cook and get the coffee ready for Maggie. Maggie still thinks I actually performed some duty that needed to be done on the turkey. The way turkeys have been produced for as long as I can remember there is little to do to them but rinse them off and pluck a stray feather or two. If my brother Jay was visiting, then we'd have the dancing turkey and the talking turkey, and turkey preparation ala Dan Ackroyd/Julia Child on Saturday Night Live sans spurts of blood. And we will both deny that we have pictures of turkeys in our computers, so don't go there!

While pretending to improve the turkey in some some way I also started the coffee. It was perhaps the key to a good Christmas meal at our house. Mainly, it was the smell of the coffee that got Maggie up and working on the stuffing. Also, the smell of coffee meant that the Baileys had been opened.
When Maggie smelled the coffee, she knew the Baileys was opened and I was probably in a good mood. I'd get the giblets boiling and she'd start making stuffing. She usually did a variation on the stuffing every year. Sometimes she threw in some cornbread or nuts, but the stuffing was always good no matter how much coffee we drank. But only the coffee and Baileys was in our part of the plan this year. Actually, since it was not our plan the Baileys and coffee probably wasn't an official activity according to the plan. It sure was tasty though.