A Turkey For You, And a Turkey for Me

Well, I've come out of my turkey coma (there should be a new holiday song: The Five Days of Turkey), and I guess I need to get writing again.

I did a different thing this year. Almost every year, my husband's family comes here for Thanksgiving (my own family sticks close to Pennsylvania, because Thanksgiving there is merely a preparation for the real holiday: The First Day of Deer Season). In years past, the imminent arrival of the inlaws and outlaws has inspired me to do strange and unusual things. Paint rooms. Redecorate the bathroom. Remove the handles from the sinks and soak them in Oxyclean before reinstalling them. Clean the dryer vent. Run around with touch-up paint and a roller brush "erasing" the marks from the walls. Scrub the toilets with a toothbrush (an old one, not my husband's). Climb on the kitchen counter and clean the tops of the cabinets (you know, because my mother-in-law MIGHT just look up there).

Last year my brother-in-law brought his girlfriend to meet us for the first time. While I've slacked off a bit over the years on pre-mother-in-law preparations, I kind of went wacko, scrubbing and cleaning and making things white and purty again (our well water, as lovely tasting as it is, has this wee rust issue). Then they all got here and spent the week discussing the evils of cleaning products to the environment. I was not amused.

This year, I decided that "Good enough for government work" was my mantra. So, I did clean up. I dusted, I vacuumed, I mopped. All at once, not the slap-dash way I normally do it (that was what was nice about having a cleaning service back in the day--coming home to a house that was ALL CLEAN AT THE SAME TIME). I made the family put away their detritus. I changed the sheets. It was all good. But, instead of rabid toothbrush-and-paint-roller wielding, I spent the pre-visitor prep time prepping what people really want at Thanksgiving: the food.

The end result was that I was not exhausted before it all even started; I had half of Thanksgiving dinner already made when I woke up on T-Day morning; and I got to relax a bit instead of pulling a four-course meal out of my you-know-what. It was good enough, everyone seemed just as happy as they always do, and I got to join in the fun instead of either watching from the sidelines or falling asleep before it started.

And that's my silver lining for today.