random thoughts – Day 2,081 (Thursday) – thanksgiving dinner 2025

The family dinner time was set for late afternoon because my youngest niece was working until 4:00. This was great news. It removed all the usual Thanksgiving morning hecticness. I could sleep late! Instead of setting up the family Canadian poultry stuffing recipe Wednesday night, I could do it in the morning. Yes, my Southern friends, I know that technically it is “dressing” because it won’t be cooked in the bird, but I’m back in Yankee land where my family calls it stuffing and it includes stuffing mix as an ingredient.

Anyway. The “sleeping late” ended up being exactly the time I usually get up. I knew it was time to get up because the dream I was in took the usual weird turns. In the dream, I was on a west coast beach with friends who I kept being separated from. We were returning home at 2:00 (coincidentally the same time Mom and I planned to be at my sister’s). I wasn’t packed yet. Friends were disappearing from the beach area, presumably to prepare for departure. I couldn’t remember where we were staying. Handsome men kept trying to make conversation but I couldn’t chat because I needed to go. (Pray tell, where are the chatty handsome men when I am awake??) In the dream, as I searched for my shoes and my friends and my lodging I was thinking “this is weird, it must be time to get up.”

Once caffeinated and alert, the stuffing production commenced. The recipe, written in Mummu’s perfect “Palmer Method” script, had been retrieved from a file box Wednesday night. In Lowell, a framed photo of it lived on my kitchen wall, but the kitchen in this house is all cabinets (actually quite great!) and practically no walls and I haven’t unearthed the framed version from the move yet.

There are questions involving the recipe that I wish I could ask Mummu. For instance, the three stalks of celery listed in the ingredients are never addressed later. Are they cooked in the skillet with the onion and meat mixture or added later with the stuffing mix and potato? Speaking of potato, the recipe specifies “2 cups of instant potatoes.” Does that mean to add two cups of the potato flakes, or does it mean to prepare the potatoes with water, milk, and butter and use two cups of that? I did the first option on the celery and the second option on the potato. It seemed more logical. Clearly, as a youngster in Mummu’s kitchen I should have paid closer attention to what she was doing instead of slinking around and eating all the olives, sweet baby gherkins, mixed nuts, and chocolates she had me set out in pretty glass dishes.

Ten of us sat around my sister’s table. There were two younger nieces and their boyfriends, the elder niece with her husband, Sis and her husband, Mom, and me. We feasted on the traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner with stuffing, potato, vegetables, macaroni and cheese, gravy, cranberry sauce, and rolls and it was delicious. Stories were told. The entertainment value of AI videos of cats playing musical instruments were discussed. There was laughter. In all ways it was good.