Vacation VIII: A Very Tiemann Thanksgiving

Soooo... Thanksgiving is a very special Holiday for me. I have loved it for years for so many reasons. The things I love that immediately come to mind are as follows:

1. 4 Day Weekend
2. Great Food (I love turkey and stuffing)
3. Friends and family get together without gifts
4. Fall is in the air and you can light fires
5. I can still go into work (if I want to) and catch up on stuff
6. I can sleep late or get up and go to breakfast with friends
7. Great food
8. Awesome smells
9. I like hosting it at my house which means I can have anything I want, the way i want it.
10. Beer, wine or both are normally involved.

Seriously, it is my favorite holiday and it is really nice getting together with family without any pressure for gifts and the bull shit that seems to surround Christmas. So it was with some trepidation that I allowed myself to be lured out to California (Godless place) to spend Thanksgiving with the Tiemann family.

There is always a problem with spending holidays with other people. They do not know your own traditions (they do things wrong), they do not know exactly how to prepare the food (they screw it up) and they do not let you edit the guest-list (their friends and family are jerks). These were just a few of my concerns. Additionally since it was California and since the Tiemann’s are faux healthy people I was threatened with the specter of Tofu Turkey which might or might not make me kill myself. The idea of tofu shaped as a drumstick is particularly troubling for me but i will leave that for me and my long suffering analyst. I had steeled myself to just going with the flow but my friends are after all my friends and they went out of their way to cater to all my whims and lubricated me with several bottles of wine along the way.

Tim Tiemann and I have a complex relationship going back to freshman year when my room mate was a gay guy and his was kindly named by our floor (The Pube). We did not bond all that well at the time but after college he dated and married a nice St. Louis girl and since then have served a father/confessor roll for one another as we amble through life. the best thing about Tim in this setting is that he is his mother’s son and he is a pleaser and that means he wants everyone to be at home, comfortable and have a good time and with his wife and families help he can really get it done. A role model as a host.

Their family and our family, although our kids are older, seem to get along pretty well and we added another family with two girls and a girl from Pepperdine (who is just too nice). The turkey was incredible. Tim humored me with the proper Pepperidge Farm stuffing. Tim had Jon make a spinach and pomegranate salad that was to die for (showing Jon how to separate the seeds from the mush in a bowl of water since they float), there were mashed potatoes and green bean casseroles and 4 pies... and more wine. It was a feast.

And the great thing about a Cali Thanksgiving is that you can walk a block to the neighborhood pool and hot tub with the kids and sit there for an hour and then come back and light a fire in the fire pit and sit there for an hour. the kids then made s’mores (very camp like) and we all sat around and chatted. Since all the adults (accept for the nice girl from Pepperdine) were drunk, everyone spent the night and it ended up being a friends and family Thanksgiving that at worst rivaled what we were missing with my extended family at home (although my nephew did bring out his girlfriend and her parents and I missed it).

It was a great time and a great time to be thankful for all God’s gifts to me and knowing once again, and having it emphasized that my family friends are ALWAYS one of the greatest.