@Kim Shook, you have my sympathy. I don't think this holiday is about food. I think it's about tradition and who is sitting at the table--and who may not be sitting there. Control freaks are gonna do their thing, only more so. There are some people you just can't get around, you just have to either make what you want or not care. My husband's father, known to all the little kids as Grandpa John, had one job, and that was to make the cranberries. Grandma Nancy had many jobs, but her most important job was making sure Grandpa John made his Cranberries, which never varied for the thirty plus years I knew him. It was straight out of a fifties Sunset Magazine and was a horror show from one end to the other: canned jelly repurposed into a giant ring studded with a zillion weird things, topped with a zillion more weird things and then covered with a thick drool of sour cream. Talk about cat yak! Not MY mother's idea of cranberries, I'll tell you that.
:So every year I made my mother's cranberries which I think came off the back of a package of Ocean Spray and was nothing more than fresh cranberries, sugar and a fresh orange, blended up into a tart, toothy relish. So every year there was Grandpa John's flying saucer and my mother's cranberries, made by yours truly. The trick my husband's big family learned early on: bring whatever you brought last year, eat whatever suits you and tell everyone at the table how good it all is. Then watch your sister- in- law drink way too much wine and tell the same story twice. The two most remembered Thanksgivings were the time the vegetarian gravy hit the picture window, which half the table thought was the best place for it, and the time the transformer outside blew in a hail of fireworks and the kids took slices of pie to the workers who restored the power at about 11 pm after five dark hours. The moral of the story is be thrilled if you don't have too much to do and get as many laughs as you can out of the day. Cheers!
