Cordial Holiday Meals With The Cords

I am the savage one. You might want to check your yams for cat-eye crust.

Well, well, well. It looks like Blogger Idol is allowing us peons to play along from the loser’s bench. I sound a little sour, but truth be told I think it is a great idea. I also like the challenge of having a topic provided for me to write about. The topic for this week is Family Traditions. You might need a cocktail for this one.

The holiday season is inevitably rushing towards us. I have to keep reminding myself of this, because in Louisiana it feels like summer throughout the entirety of this thing they call “fall”. I am not quite sure what that word means. The first in the string of holiday festivities for my family is Thanksgiving which then leads straight on into Christmas and ends with New Years. I know you are grateful for that uncommon knowledge I just provided.

I present to you a play-by-play of all three holiday dinners in my household, as they are all identical if you swap a ham for a turkey in December. The predictable behavior that repeats year by year is the tradition in itself. Your play-by-play stars myself, my mother, my father, and my brother. Action!

It is approaching noon, and I am the last one to arise from the quick sand that is the mattress on my bed in my parents house. There is such a thing as too soft (YEAH!). I say my parents house, because I never actually lived there. Built my senior year of high school, it conveniently did not come to fruition until I was permanently transplanted to a city three hours away.

In the kitchen, Mom is halfheartedly cooking as I join in to make the only dish I have delegation over. The salad. This is usually when I start discreetly drinking white wine. I don’t drink white wine, but it is the only thing my mother has opened at this point in the morning (strictly to use in the stuffing) so I take one for the team. The team being me and my liver.

Now, it is my brother’s cue to start asking when the food will be ready every ten minutes in the whiniest of ten-year old voices. He is twenty-eight. Oh, and all the while he is likely consuming something in its raw form. I think he dreams of flirting with salmonella poisoning.

Oh god. Here comes dad with the camera. My mother, brother, and I all squirm to escape the wrath of his lens, but to no avail. An absurd number of snapshots are collected capturing nothing but eye rolls, unflattering posture, and outward facing palms . To this day I will never understand the sadistic pleasure my father gets from this ritual.

After cooking preparation is complete, and I’ve successfully made everyone believe I’ve only had one glass of wine instead of three, we sit to eat.

I look over to find Mom feeding it (the cat) pieces of turkey and speaking to it in a cringe worthy tone. It is a crusty faced excuse for a cat that looks identical to the nightmare inducing creature in the photo at the beginning of this post. My brother condescendingly refers to it as “the savage one”

Ding ding ding! It’s time for the opening arguments. Literally. In the main ring we have Brother vs. Mom, the heavyweight bickering champions for twenty years and counting. Please also welcome your refs, Becca and Dad, the biggest pushovers of the entire Cord clan. It’s a long battle, but with one mean right hook from brother and it’s all over. It is clear to the refs by her deafening silence and coldly folded arms that Mom is out for the count.

My mother sits at the table alone long after the rest of us disperse to continue feeding and fondling the savage one. Dad collapses to the floor in a coma (why he doesn’t use a bed, a sofa, or even a chair is also an inexplicable phenomenon). Brother disappears in a blur immediately fleeing to his friend’s house to escape the scowls from Mom as she pouts in defeat.

After my secretly fourth glass of wine, I too retreat and succumb once again to the venus bed trap.

Related articles

• T ~ is for Turkey Day (onthehomefrontandbeyond.wordpress.com)
• Family Dinner With Your Children (lynleahz.com)
• Thanksgiving Food & Thanksgiving Potluck | Pottery Barn (potterybarn.com)