Invite everyone, and then forget that you invited everyone

You put out feelers. Is this a good idea? Everybody says yes. You play it conservative. 13lb or 19lb? Smaller birds taste better and are easier to carry home. You gift your future self. How many sides? One. No, two. Two.

Everyone knows you’re a terrible baker, which is why six pies appear and people only touch four of them. Days later, you find unopened cans of whipped cream in your lettuce crisper, next to – somehow, in Chicago – a single quince. The eventual carnage takes three days to clean up. 35 people come through. The whole thing is over in four hours.

We have already spoken about how the only correct way to work with turkey is to bathe it in half its body weight in compound butter for five hours, then blowtorch the skin. Mashed potatoes are half butter, half cream, half potato. It is the first time all year that you use your potato masher for its intended purpose and not, say, pasta sauce, which makes no appearance, because this is Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a writing prompt that nobody asked for and everyone must follow. Nobody eats turkey on purpose, because it is dry and flavorless. People stopped eating sides that were two-thirds cream and butter a generation ago, after we learned about things like heart disease & climate change. Stuffing is a glued-together food abomination, a novelty stunt that somehow combines bread with meat in a way that is supposed to avoid structural failure. It is never succcessful. The whole of science has been brought to bear on this problem for generations, and yet it doesn’t stop people from trying.