So what's your best Thanksgiving story? Here's mine:
I had been married a little over a year, but only just moved in with my wife about 4 months before because we had been assigned to two different bases. This was our first Thanksgiving together. To make it even more special, we had a two month old baby AND the in-laws were coming for the holidays! Yeah!
So, I'm leaving the squadron for the day; I call my wife who is at home frantically cleaning for the arriving parents to see if she needs anything for the next day: Thanksgiving! She reminds me we still need a turkey, so I tell her, "Hey, no problem, I run by the commissary (supermarket) and pick one up on the way home."
I run down the street, fight my way through the maddening holiday crowd to the meat section, and spot the freezer box still full of Turkeys. This is the age before cell phones, so I have to make a command decision on size and vendor, but I think,"Hey, how tough can this be?" We have four adults, and a baby, don't need nothing too big, so I grab a 17 lbs. Butterball and head for the check-out line.
An hour later I drive out the gate into the fading twilight of a late November evening. As I pull in the drive-way, I see my In-laws have arrived and can't wait to show off what a good job I've done providing for my family.
I walk into the kitchen with the Turkey, and all conversation comes to an abrupt halt. Everyone is not staring at me, they are staring at the frozen hunk of meat dangling from my tiring arm. I'm like, "what?"
"It's frozen," my wife whispers.
"Well, yeah, aren't they all?" I reply
"No!" is the chorus from wife and Mother-In-Law! A look of growing panic starts to spread over my wife's face as she starts looking into the future of tomorrow's meal and it is starting to look more and more like chinese food....
They explain to me that no one, NO ONE buys frozen turkeys the day before Thanksgiving cuz they take literally days to thaw. Everyone knows that. I've never even heard of this. As far as I know. I show up about mid day on Thanksgiving and there's a meal ready to eat. Preparation is not something anyone has ever bothered to explain before. College certainly didn't cover cooking turkey. Uh oh.
I start to sweat. I start to feel like a failure... but wait! Suddenly college DOES come to the rescue. I think back to thermodynamics, physics, and a little loved theory called entropy. I grab the hunka-hunk of frozen dove and head to the bathroom, where I fill the bathtub with luke-warm water. I tear the plastic off, pull out the gizzards, immerse the bird and start rubbing it down like a hypothermia victim.
By this time I have quite an audience: Wife, Mother- AND father-in-law are all in the doorway shaking their heads, obviously thinking I've gone totally crazy, but I assure them that the bird WILL thaw by morning and be ready for the oven on time. It's physics!!! I don't think they believed me, but since I was on a roll, and it was too late to do anything different we just went for it.
Cut to the Thanksgiving morning - there it was: the turkey, floating languidly in the bath, pink, rosy and supple to the touch... ready for it's date with destiny.
So... let this be a lesson to you... in a pinch.. when the pressure's on....you CAN thaw a 17 lbs. turkey overnight, NOT die of food poisoning, and survive the first visit of your In-laws mostly intact.
