A Feast Best Served Cursed

Detroit prepares to lose.  Again.

Happy Turkey Day, people.

I hope everyone out there thoroughly enjoys this special day of giving thanks, watching the Lions, gorging themselves blind, and, more likely than not, engaging in fisticuffs with complete strangers over $50-off tablets at a Wal-Mart.

'Tis the season.

Here at the Houghs, our original plans - to celebrate Thanksgiving at the Voigts' house, as we have the last four years in a row - were kibosh'd when Abby fell sick a few days ago.  This would mark the second year in a row that a Hough began projectile-vomiting around Thanksgiving (as you'll be so good to remember), and reaffirmed our suspicion that, indeed, there exists a dreadful Hough Family Thanksgiving Curse. 

Oddly enough, Abby actually felt fine the morning of Thanksgiving, when we dropped Mom and John off at the airport - it was Alayna that came out of left field and started running a high fever.  The night before, she had complained of headaches, and had voluntarily gone to bed early - something that never happens.  Sure enough, this morning she woke up hot, and - after returning from dropping Mom and John off at the airport - napped until nearly noon.  

And so, not wanting to spread sickness among the Voigt household and their party guests like the Bubonic Plague, we opted to sit this year out, circle the wagons, and have our own very own, private Thankgiving.

We found Vernors down here!

This had been the first time we've celebrated Turkey Day by ourselves since 2007, and likewise we wanted to make sure we didn't go bat-shit crazy with the feasting.  Kris picked up a chicken from Publix in place of a traditional turkey, seeing how there were only two people who would most likely eat the bird (our kids are weird).  She also bought a few boxes of Thanksgiving staples while she was at it - Stove Top, mashed potatoes, a cherry pie, a loaf of gourmet bread, etc. 

After the girls were put down for their naps, Kris and I decided to throw up the Christmas Tree.  For whatever reason, this was way more difficult than it had been any other year.  Not sure why, exactly, but it took over an hour for the two of us to figure out how the damn thing fit together and plugged in.  

While we were on-again/off-again wrestling with our yuletide centerpiece, I was able to throw back a few beers and watch the Lions lose - something that NEVER happens down here in Florida - and Kris was able to kick-start our Thanksgiving mini-feast. . . 

Observe:

It wouldn't be Thanksgiving without watching the home team getting their asses beat.

Once the kids got up from their naps, unfortunately, Detroit vs. Houston magically transformed into Beauty and the Beast.  Surprise surprise.

Kris douches up the chicken. . .

After awhile of Beauty and the Beast'ing, the kids began to get bored, so I let them ride their ridables around in the newly-cleaned/organized garage (one of my 'To-Do' objectives during my week off of work). . .

 

Lemon Chicken, prepared with fresh lemons cut from our own backyard. . . (if you need some lemons, let us know - we're sitting on a truckload over here. . .)

 

Kris' spread.

We opted to have Thanksgiving out on our patio, since it was 73 degrees out and all.  Plus we have crap-loads of Christmas lights hung up, so it's festive as hell.  Can't argue with that.

Bring on the wine.

 

Not surprisingly, despite Kris' hours of slaving away over our Feast of Thanks, after a mere two minutes or so of 'I don't like this,' and 'that looks yucky,' the girls were officially fun-ed out with Thanksgiving, and retired to their easel to work on what I can only assume was an awe-inspiring collaborative masterpiece. . . (*pfft)

After dinner, Alayna lied down on the couch in front of the TV - being sick as she was, it wasn't too surprising that she didn't want to eat much.  Abby, on the other hand. . .

After an hour passed, Abby complained of being hungry, so Kris warmed up some random chicken-and-pasta dish she got from Sunchild.  I'm not sure what's in this recipe, but whatever it is, both girls generally take to it like a hobo to a crack pipe. . .

Abby reaches the bottom of her bowl.  Unbridled hell-fury ensues. . .

Before I continue with the pictures, I'd like to mention two Christmas movies I was forced to watch throughout the course of the evening.  Both are straight from the Rankin/Bass playbook, having been produced in the wake of Rudolph and the Red-Nosed Reindeer back in the '60s/'70s.

The first movie the girls chose to watch today (the official Hough start date for the Christmas 2012 season) was the accursed The Year Without Santa Clause.  I'll let you do your own research on this cinematic clusterf***. . . I wouldn't know where to begin summarizing this movie.  It's like the Rankin/Bass people went off into the wild for a month, sustaining themselves on nothing but peyote and their own over-inflated, humongo-egos. 

More or less, from what I can gather is that Santa wakes up one  morning, having a pity party, and Mrs. Clause, suffering from delusions of grandeur, recruits a couple of mentally handicapped elves from the factory floor to hijack Santa's reindeer and start an inter-climatory war between a pair of siblings whose utter disdain for one another rival the Gallagher brothers.

If that ridiculousness wasn't enough, my two tax deductions follow this horrifying hour-long waste of human effort by watching Rudolph's Shiny New Year.  I wasn't in the room for the majority of this movie, fortunately - I was still out in the garage, trying to wedge a flat-head screwdriver into my eye-sockets after watching the previous movie - so I'm not 100% clear on this movie's plot line, either.

Not that it needed one.

What I can piece together is that Rudolph, fresh off his victory over the Fog dilemma from his more well-known (and more stomachable) movie, is hunting down this human/elephant hybrid orphan who is bouncing out of control along the time/space continuum.  I'm not sure why.  Something about stopping a bad guy, I don't know.  Anyway, Rudolph somehow manages to discover the secret to time travel, and - in his infinite, quadrupedal wisdom - deems it beneficial for his cause to recruit a homo sapien neanderthalis specimen, an 84-year-old Don Quixote, and - I'm being completely serious, here - Benhamin f***in' Franklin.

Not sure how it ended, and frankly I don't care. 

After the kids passed out for the evening - which, at 7:30/8pm, didn't come nearly as soon enough as I would've liked - Kris and I threw in our favorite, get-ready-for-the-season movie, Some Like It Hot.  This has become a yearly tradition for us, though for the life of us we're not sure how it started.  Every year we decorate our Christmas tree to this movie, and I'm pretty sure I can say, with a modest degree of certainty, that we're the only couple in the continental United States to do this. . .

Christmas Cocktails: CHECK.  1 1/2 oz. Creme de Cocoa, 1 oz. Peppermint Schnapps, 1 oz. cream. Garnish with candy cane, get your own yule on appropriately.

(this isn't a dress)

We never put all the ornaments up - we save all the cheap, 'kid-proof' ornaments for the kids to throw up.  Not that we value their taste in ornament distribution, per se - they have a nasty tendency of clustering all their ornaments together in a way that would make many an art major off themselves with a shotgun. . .

**Updated Fri. 11/23 @ 9:32am. . .**

When the girls woke up in the morning, we set out the remaining Christmas Ornaments (the who-gives-a-shit-if-it-breaks ornaments) for the girls to hang on the tree. . .

(. . .needless to say, both girls were pretty stoked up about having a fully-decorated, 7 1/2 ft Christmas tree in their living room when they woke up.)

This is what our Instant Queue on Netflix looks like these days.  Could be a LOT worse.)

Abby managed to mangle a few jingle bells in the process, but she was able to do hang up a Christmas ornament or two this year.

- Brian