Pondering peaceful Thanksgivings and stuffing without fingernail bits

My wife sometimes thinks about the future and what Thanksgiving will be like when the kids are all grown up and out of the house. She envisions a packed house full of our children, their spouses, and grandchildren running all over. Something straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Not me. I envision something different. I envision Grandpa (me) in the garage nursing my third beer of the evening and waiting for the house to empty. Never been one for the packed-house scene. It’s just me being a grump, though. For one, I can’t drink beer much anymore, and for another, while I talk a good game, I’m sure I’ll be in the house doing my best to make my grandkids as bratty as possible before I send them home with their parents.

But still...some of my fondest Thanksgiving and Christmas memories were when I was a child, being in my sweatpants all day, waiting for the frozen pizza to come out of the oven. My folks were kind of untraditional that way. They figured that they worked their tails off 365 days a year (owned their own business and there was never, ever a holiday), so a day when we could just be vegetables was rare. Having grown up that way, I thought that is what everybody did. Then I grew up and got married.

Suddenly, the holidays meant flying all over the evening before and dropping stuff off here, stopping by there and running like crazy to get prepared for the next day. Go home, get a few hours of sleep, and then get up at the crack of dawn to start the schedule. Put on my dress shoes, slacks and a nice shirt. I really didn’t get this part. I was working construction at the time and here I was, on a holiday, putting on nicer clothes than the ones I wore every day. Dang it, what kind of holiday was that? Run to this in-law’s house, run to that in-law’s house and as we run later and later we ran the risk of people getting upset, hurt, annoyed —whatever. Finally get to the house where we’re having dinner and it’s show time! Usually didn’t take more than a half-hour before my wife and her mother would start at each other. More than once I ended up going outside and just sitting in the car to get away from it all. Ah, the peace. At least, until they finally noticed I was gone and somebody came out to get me. Sigh, back into the chaos.

This is the atmosphere where I inherited the moniker of “Mean Uncle Ben.” There were a few younger nephews and nieces that were, well, brats. Running through the house screaming and shouting, yelling at their parents, refusing to listen and often something would end up broken.

In small doses, I could ignore them and figure they were their parent’s problem. But trapped in a loud, crowded house it would often get the best of me. More than once I overheard a sibling in another room telling their child, “You better straighten up! Uncle Ben doesn’t mess around!”

I think the most memorable holiday was when I had to grab a nephew who kept tearing through the grandparent’s house knocking things over etc. I bent over, got eye-to-eye and sternly said, “Stop. Running. Now!”

This approach had never failed me, but it wasn’t working with this boy. No, he was beyond even this tactic.

He looked up at me defiantly and loudly said, “You’re not my Dad! You can’t tell me what to do!”

At which point I reminded him that yes, he’s right; I’m not his Dad. I don’t love him like his Dad. And therefore, I had no problem ripping off his little arms and clubbing him with them, if he didn’t knock it off.

Probably not the method Dr. Spock would have recommended, but it worked quite well. After that, if I so much as glared, they would quiet and settle down.

Having grown up eating frozen pizza and such for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I wasn’t used to all the various foods that some people ate. But stuffing is always good, so I loaded up on that. Imagine my horror when I bit into a mouthful of stuffing and felt what could only be a fingernail trimming.

I sat there for an eternity watching everybody eat, holding a mouthful of stuffing in my mouth wondering what to do. Finally, when everybody had their attention drawn to somebody’s joke or story, I was able to spit it into a napkin. I was relieved when I learned later that some people put slices of almonds into their stuffing!

My ex-wife, her family, most of my family, and Glenny’s family all live in Washington state. Thankfully my Thanksgiving and Christmas are far more stress free now. Maybe not as casual as my folks were growing up, but I still stay at home and lounge. Glenny makes great food and a couple of my relatives come over to partake. But not too many. And most importantly, there’s never any stress, fighting, arguing, hurt feelings, bratty kids, or fingernail bits in the stuffing!

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.