Well, now we're into it, aren't we?
As I write this, it is Saturday, November 23. This means we are but five days away from Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving has always been a magical time for me, at least to an extent. It's a deeply nostalgic time more than anything else. There are multiple traditions I've always tried to keep for Thanksgiving, traditions that mostly started when I was a child -- some, of course, I've been more successful at than others:
1. Get up early on Thanksgiving morning and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade™
2. Follow that by watching the dog show
3. Follow that by eating a fuckton of Thanksgiving food
4. Follow that by watching whatever football games are on in the afternoon/evening hours
5. Sleep early and be awake very early in the morning (like, 2am) for Black Friday shopping -- either in person or online.
Over the years, most of these traditions have changed heavily or have gone away completely. Most of the time I don't watch the dog show now and most of the time I also only about halfway pay attention to the parade -- the parade has become too commercial in all of the worst ways. It's no longer about the parade itself with the commentators and balloons and marching bands, but promoting whatever's on Broadway or singers/dancers etc that nobody has heard of and cares even less about -- and that's interspersed with far too many commercials. Like, an obscene amount of commercials. The years where it's most interesting are the years where the weather is really bad, like snowstorm weather or high winds or whipping rain, etc, where the balloons careen into things and/or do property damage.
Also, it doesn't help that most of the balloons I grew up with are no longer in the parade. I remember seeing Garfield, Snoopy, Spider-Man, Superman, Woody Woodpecker, various iterations of Pikachu, etc when I was a kid. I don't know if any of those balloons are even still flown anymore. If they are, they've been featured in blink-and-you'll-miss-it short segments before they have to go to another commercial or have yet another low-rent singer or Broadway act perform a song nobody has ever heard of.
As for the dog show, well...when I was a dog person, I really used to enjoy it. My mother still does and still watches it every year as she cooks the Thanksgiving meal. These days I'm generally just bored by it. I have five cats -- dogs no longer interest me for the most part. Cats are the superior pet, and most of them are nowhere near as needy.
The Thanksgiving food and football traditions are still pretty standard and haven't changed over the years. I don't always get to watch the football -- it depends heavily on where I am and what family is in town, and sometimes even who is playing each other in the games (though that doesn't usually matter that much to me, honestly).
I do tend to go to sleep earlier than usual these days on Thanksgiving night, but usually because my schedule has been flipped and because I've been awake since the early morning hours. Holidays are hard when you generally work overnights; they tend to sap a lot of your energy, especially if you need a lot of prep time for them beforehand, and they also require just as much downtime and recovery time after them. But, I do remember the days of waking up at like 2am to go to Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and various other stores for Black Friday sales, and being there when the doors opened at 4 or 5 to get deals on things. Those times are way over for me now. I have a mortgage and lots of bills now, and the newest iPhone; there's not a lot of disposable income I can blow on a big-ticket Black Friday purchase. And most of the time now, I don't even pay attention to the sales online -- the last few years of Amazon's Black Friday and Cyber Monday stuff has been abysmal, with absolutely nothing I've wanted or needed.
I also don't think stores realize that their "sale" items for Black Friday actually have to be on sale. We don't want like $20 off retail price, we want Wish prices, Alibaba prices, Temu prices on stuff.
But, I digress.
Daisy has said there's one thing and one thing only she's specifically looking for on Black Friday this year, and that's a new food processor for herself/us. But it has to be the right one, of course.
Now, we have a food processor -- Mama, as the first gift she ever gave me for anything for any holiday whatsoever, gifted me a relatively nice food processor in 2012 when Daisy and I had first gotten together. It only got sporadic use for a few years until Daisy and I got married, which was when we started using it more.
Well, after 12 years, while it still works okay, it's not exactly in the best of shape. It's near impossible to fully clean, some of the plastic parts of it are cracked, and Daisy -- who is in the midst of cleaning out and redoing our entire kitchen, including repainting the walls dark purple (like my hair) in the near future -- wants a new one. I'm fine with this, of course. Whatever the wife wants, she gets. Daisy does the vast majority of the cooking in the house anyway; I make dinner for us like once every 6-8 months or so. Liberal estimate. And how much could a new food processor be, anyway? $200 at most? Sure. Go nuts, my lovely wife.
I finished all Christmas shopping for Daisy about a month ago or so. She also let me know she has finished shopping for me, even though there wasn't really anything of substance I asked her for. For some ideas, as according to her I am notoriously difficult to shop for, I sent her a few links on Tiktok for some handheld retro gaming systems, mentioned that as per the usual I would love the new Uncle John's Bathroom Reader book for 2024, and said that if she really wanted to make me happy, she could get me Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department 4-disc anthology collection once it's released at Target on Black Friday (and available online the next day).
No, I'm not making that last one up, I'm 100% serious. Judge me if you must; that's an objectively great record.
But honestly, I don't really need anything from Daisy for Christmas, or even for my birthday for that matter. There's not really anything I want, and I tried to abide by her wishes this year and not spend a lot of money on her (I succeeded in this) and to get her things she'd enjoy. I also have zero clue what she's gotten me. Daisy has consistently gotten strange gifts for people when left to her own devices. One year she got me this little statuette of what looks like an anthropomorphic ballsack that sits on my desk and stares at me with judging eyes. One year she got her father a gigantic ceramic fish that was talked about for the better part of a decade (remember, we've been together a long time). This year, I truly have no clue what she could have possibly gotten me. I prefer it that way, too.
My gifts for the family (and some friends), of course, are the tie-dye shirts. I have already boxed up most of them, including some of the ones I will need to mail out to Daisy's sister and family who now live in Ohio (previously they had lived in two different provinces in Canada, and then in Pennsylvania for the past two years). I'll likely send a box of them to my parents too, though I am not sure yet -- they also got several of them when we visited in August. We'll see what happens; I am not exactly happy about shipping costs via USPS right now, but it is what it is.
We still have a fair amount to do in the leadup to Thanksgiving; for one, we don't have most of the ingredients yet for dinner. Daisy and I will need to go pick up potatoes, carrots, onions, and likely a few other key items in order to make dinner happen for the whole clan on Thursday. And yes, it will be the whole clan -- Daisy's sister, our brother in law, and their four boys arrive in town from Denver on Monday. It was iffy for some time whether they'd be coming in or not. For big family dinners like this, Daisy almost always handles all the vegetables for it, creates the (vegan) gravy and makes the stuffing, Dad handles the turkey, Mama handles rolls and likely at least one type of dessert, and to round it out Daisy usually makes some sort of pie as well. In general, I usually have to do next to nothing in the actual meal prep. I do offer my help and services, but usually am shooed out of the kitchen as soon as I ask. Sometimes I get to peel the carrots. It's complicated is what I'm saying.
Because the family will be in town in two days, we also have a lot to do on the backend for ourselves that we're just not going to have time to do the rest of the week. I work tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday. The family is taking the kids to the zoo on Wednesday (they have free passes that expire at the end of this month). I will not be attending, as, well...I'll be asleep after working all night Tuesday night. I took off Wednesday and the following Sunday to stretch the holiday from a three-day-weekend into a five-day-weekend just to get some more recovery time.
This also does not stop the normal household errands and chores we have to take care of on a regular basis, nor does it put a pause on Daisy's kitchen renovations; today we're going to attempt to get most of those necessary grocery ingredients for dinner, plus pick up cat litter and wrapping paper, and visit the parents for a bit of quiet time with them before the entire family arrives in town. A lot of this unfortunately cannot wait until next weekend or be parceled out into shorter errands one-at-a-time throughout the week; about the only one that could would be picking up wrapping paper and/or other holiday necessities. However, for the next three days I'm pretty flexible; I'm going to sleep when I can and work on helping Daisy get stuff done when I'm not asleep and not at work. I can be sleep-deprived or a little more stressed than usual on a short week of work. I can sleep all day and all night Wednesday if I need to.
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