1) Way too early wake-up call
2) Trip to the ER for a family member
3) Thanksgiving dinner at 8:00PM
4) Still thankful for it all.
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Happy Way Belated Turkey Day, hope yours went well. For some reason my family has a habit (or shall I say tradition) of making Thanksgiving memorable in unusual ways. For example, one year my mom and grandma attempted to make their own turkey because we were all snowed in together. It went...well, let's just say we didn't get to have turkey that year, but it is a great memory to have now, especially because my grandma passed away almost exactly a year later, three days before Thanksgiving. The most recent example of this out of the ordinary holiday habit would be my cousin's coming out four years ago before we sat down to eat. We have actually had some Turkey Days go according to plan, but we cannot count 2010 among them.
The day started out with such promise. Everyone was up early, thanks to the kids, so we played some football out in the cold, then ran out to various stores to get last minute stuff for dinner. This is where the day took a turn. My uncle decided he would use the extra time in his day to get started on his Christmas lights, and this man is notorious for his close calls while attempting to put up decorations. Once he decided to put up lights while no one else was home and my aunt returned from shopping to find him hanging off of the gutter, (how it held his weight for an hour and half we will never know). Last year he almost knocked me off the roof with a giant candy cane and he minorly electrocuted his own son. Twice he has fallen off the roof, landing in the bushes both times and escaping with just minor cuts and bruises. The third time must really be the charm because there was nothing to pad his fall this time and he broke his leg and sprained his wrist. That would be bad enough, right? But that's not all folks, not for my family.
My aunt takes her husband to the ER and everybody goes back to watching football, hoping they'll be back sooner rather than later. It doesn't occur to anyone until around 3:00 PM that my aunt was the one who was in charge of the majority of the cooking (and, okay yes maybe we had been drinking a little and that's why it took us so long to realize this minor detail). So my mom starts drafting people to get into the kitchen and everyone spends the next four hours existing on only veggies and dip while everything cooks. Finally at around 7:45 PM we all sit down to dinner, including my now heavily medicated uncle. From then on, the rest of the night was awesome.
Still, I wouldn't trade the burn on my hand I got from the turkey pan or the hour and a half my brother and I spent trying to fix the Christmas lights for anything. The entire day was one beautiful disaster after another but it all worked out in the end. It could always be worse and I know everything that went down was minor in the grand scheme of things. Obviously people should be thankful for the things in their lives everyday and I genuinely try to be, but it's not always easy. I realized recently that I've never actually voiced how thankful I am just to still be around right now. I came to terms a long time ago with what the entire year of 2002 did to me though it took me way to long to appreciate that I was still alive for a reason. I should be even more thankful considering I died twice. So, after thinking long and hard about what I'm truly thankful for, I've concluded that my answer is Life. Just life in general, all the little things that push you to the edge and all the perfect moments that make you wish they would never end. I could very easily have been the one out of that accident that didn't make it, and sometimes I wonder why that is, but I know that I am thankful that I'm here and that I'm able to experience life and all its ups and downs.
