I went roller skating in public with no pants and it may or may not have been Thanksgiving

Don't you love not having to go to work? It's one of my favorite things about holidays. The not going to work.

I get so much done. It's not even 8am and I've already emptied the dishwasher, baked a pie, washed the kitchen rugs, had about a million cups of coffee, whipped up a pitcher of Bloody Mary's and made cocktail sauce for the gorgeous giant shrimp (oxymoron anyone?) I bought yesterday on a whim when I picked up my turkey from the deli.

Perhaps much of what I've just described sounds a bit like work, but it's my work and I do it because I want to. So there.

All this holiday hoo-haw and you'd think that I was entertaining for the masses, but sadly this year it's just me, MDH and our cat. I decided to pull out all the stops even if it is only the 3 of us.

I include the cat in the festivities although he won't technically be joining us for dinner at the table and I would beat him with a broom handle if he jumped on the counter and laid a whisker on my beautiful roasted bird, but I did buy him a special can of Fancy Feast turkey and giblets.

This will be the first Thanksgiving that we have ever spent without family and/or friends. How weird.

When I was a kid Thanksgiving and most other holidays were always at my parents house. That's just the way it was. Probably due to the controlling nature of my mother combined with the twin facts that we had the biggest house and were more centrally located to our relatives. I'm not even sure my mom ever actually invited anyone. People just seemed to naturally show up.

While I have a small nuclear family, I have an enormous extended family. Aunts, uncles, and buttloads of cousins. (We are hillbillies after all.) So I have somewhere near like 25 first cousins and of those about 15 of us are within a 4 year age range of each other.

On Thanksgiving day while the mom's were busy cooking and the dad's were occupied playing poker and occasionally slipping out to the shed to steal sips of corn whiskey from the mason jar my dad hid behind a collection of old car batteries, us kids were left to our own devices for very long periods of time. I'm pretty sure there would have had to have been an explosion or rifle fire before any of the adults would have taken notice of us and even then I might not have been surprised if they merely told us to keep the noise down and to sop up the blood before it made a stain.

One year when I was very young, like not more than 6 or 7, I seem to recall that some adult, perhaps one of the older cousins, had had enough of our destructive and rowdy bullshit and decided to get us the hell out of the house and took us all roller skating.

As I type this I begin to doubt whether or not this actually took place on Thanksgiving because what roller rink would be open on Thanksgiving day? Is that possible?

Anyhoo... you will have to suspend your disbelief along with me and mine because I can't think of any other holiday or reason we would all be together and I want to carry on with this story so that I can finish this blog post and dress my turkey and get that mo-fo in the oven.

Besides, whether it's real or not, going roller skating on Thanksgiving day with all of my cousins is one of my best and favorite childhood memories.

One thing I do remember vividly is the fact that I left the house wearing only half of my special Thanksgiving outfit and my parents and the other adults around were so drunk and busy cooking or gambling that no one noticed.

My mom bought me a Jan Brady type of ensemble consisting of a longish, plaid, button front top with a Peter Pan collar and a matching pair of elastic waist bell bottom trousers. I loved the top and despised the bottoms. They were itchy.

The top was just long enough to cover my tush if I stood completely still. So it might have been just fine if we decided to go to the movies or pose for oil portraits.

I thought I looked like my favorite child movie star Shirley Temple, who frequently pranced around my TV screen in black and white, wearing short little dresses with bobby socks and lace up shoes. Apparently I did not grasp the concept of how fashions evolve over time, the importance of covering up your bum in public or, more importantly, how frequently one is required to bend over while roller skating.


I (bottom right corner) along with a few of my cousins, circa 1979, hope you make some great fuzzy holiday memories for yourself this year.

Happy Thanksgiving!