the big Thanksgiving weekend

FAMILY PHOTOS. I forgot to take any. But I did take eight pictures of the turkey. I was hungry.

FAMILY DRAMA. My 13 year-old cousin threw himself down sobbing because we told him to stop laying across the floor like a slug and tripping everyone, then he built a pillow fort around himself because WHY NOT EVERYONE HATES ME ANYWAY YOU SHOULD ALL BE HAPPY NOW NOT TO HAVE TO LOOK AT ME. And because he is my cousin and not my precious nephew or beloved grandchild, I threw all the pillows off him and told him to stop being an asshole. "DRAINS AND RADIATORS," I yelled tenderly. "People will like you if you radiate good feels, and they will not like you if you drain all the good feels from the room." Yes, I said 'feels'. I had had a glass of wine. "BUT," I hollered on, "People will also immediately forgive people for being assholes if they just take a minute to think about it and then turn it around. TURN IT AROUND." He turned around and faced the wall and sobbed loudly. I made sucking noises like a drain. Gavin and I put on a podcast and laid around playing with Zenny until the sniffling stopped and the teenager came oozing quietly across the floor to listen with us. Someone made a dingledong joke and we all burst out laughing. The rest of the evening went pretty well, with pie and tea and dingledong joke reenactments. "I turned it around," cousinface quietly told me as we packed up to leave, and I was stunned that someone had actually listened to something I had been yelling. Leif just lets his eyes go unfocused while I try to pop my own head with my internal barometer.

TWO MORE PAYCHECKS TO CHRISTMAS OH NO. We set up the tree as soon as Thanksgiving was packed away in tupperware. It was a fake tree, but it was pre-lit, which turned out to be important because we forgot to pack any lights when we moved. Also missing: almost all our ornaments. And our stockings are somewhere at my mother's house. BUT WE HAVE A TREE UP. And there are cats in it, so that's kind of like ornaments. The first door on the advent calendar is open, the man baked coconut macaroons, I made lychee liqueor out of the fruit we've been soaking in gin since July, and in general we are panicking and flailing around, trying to pull off the holidays on a shoestring. I was going to make a fruitcake again, but it is a month's worth of work for something the kids won't eat anyway, so we decided just to drink the bottle of brandy and make a plum pudding instead. That is time/booze economics.

Next: "sponge candy". With pictures. And hopefully no fire extinguisher, because we don't have one.