Thanksgiving recap, written in the style of my hero, escape-artist and author-on-the-run, Lemony Snicket

I imagine I piqued your curiosity when I spoke about Thanksgiving. You might be wondering, for instance, was the food as wonderful as the menu made it sound? Or, perhaps, whatever happened with all that drama around Jason’s family? Well, dear readers, I strongly advise you to forget all about these questions and stop reading this post. I have a solemn duty to tell the tale of Thanksgiving dinner at my house but you, as far as I can tell from my own research, are under no obligation to read it. I will be haunted forevermore by my memories of that fateful day but there is no reason you should be. In the paragraphs that follow I recount a story of woe that includes such horrifying subjects as pasty root vegetables, angry in-laws, a messy chocolate cream pie and other disasters. It would be best for you if you stopped reading this post right now and turned instead to the New York Times where you will read more heart-warming stories.

This is your last chance to stop reading before I begin my Thanksgiving recap. “Recap” can mean to put the cap back on something but it can also be a shortened version of the word “recapitulate.” People often use shortened versions of words to save time and that is what I am doing here. “Recapitulate” here means “to tell you, in the shortest version possible, all the important things that happened at my house on Thanksgiving.”

The mashed potatoes were a little dry. I was working on them at about the same time that the turkey was refusing to get finished so I think I forgot to taste them to make sure I had added enough butter and milk. I narrowly averted disaster with the chocolate cream pie because the filling just didn’t thicken for the longest time. “Narrowly averted disaster” is just a fancy way of saying “the chocolate cream pie turned out alright in the end even though it seemed like it might not.”

Apart from these small problems, the day came off without a hitch. The expression “without a hitch” doesn’t have anything to do with metal hook-like things that people attach to the back of their cars so they can pull trailers and other things behind them. Nor does it pertain to getting married or getting rides by sticking your thumb out at the side of the road. Here hitch is talking about how many problems I came up against when trying to have a nice Thanksgiving with my family and friends. My partner’s persnickety parents kept out of our hair. “Persnickety” here means “so concerned with petty details that they are always causing trouble of one sort or another.” All of our guests hit it off. The expression “hit it off” has nothing at all to do with hitting. Instead it is just a way of saying that, even though many of them had never met before, all the people at Thanksgiving dinner liked one another right away and had plenty of common interests they could talk about. After dessert we played games, one of which was called “Apples to Apples,” even though it is a game played with special cards and apples are not involved in it at all.