By Fred Moreno
Many people look forward to the day after Thanksgiving, more commonly known as Black Friday, because it is the best day of the year for Christmas sales and bargains. When I think of Black Friday, I think of the annual battle I have with my wife regarding the recently consumed Thanksgiving dinner. It’s your classic, “I told you so” confrontation.
This year the argument began on Wednesday, Thanksgiving Eve, when I warned my bride that she was making way too much of everything for the amount of people we were hosting. Her retort was that if she listened to “cheapo” me, she would have to send out for Chinese food directly after dinner or our guests would suffer the ill effects of malnutrition.
Now this year we were having 12 parasites for dinner, so according to my calculations we needed at most a 12 pound bird. My darling wife went out and came home with a 24 pound turkey — better known as two pounds of fowl per person. The outcome? The aluminum foil that we used to wrap the 12 pounds of leftovers could have covered the infield at Yankee Stadium.
Did I hear an apology or some type of acknowledgement of my math estimate? Of course not. My wife’s defense was that all the “waste” will eventually be consumed in the form of turkey salad. That means we’re going to be eating turkey salad while watching the Macy’s fireworks show on the 4th of July.
Next was the beet controversy. I told my wife weeks ago that nobody eats beets. I kept reminding her that she was cooking with her heart, not her brain, but she refused to have her heart skip the beets. I think she intentionally came home with the largest jar of beets I’ve ever seen of which — 90 percent was leftover.
I must say I was not as annoyed with her extra beets as I was about the turkey because I had my eye on the jar. I could use it as a spare bottle for the water cooler at work. Nevertheless, she was still wrong about her beet guesstimate.
The icing on the cake was just that. My wife actually asked me to come with her to Costco a few days before the holiday not to pick out the dessert, but to help carry it. I almost got a double hernia carrying this apple pie. I thought I had to tie it to the roof.
When my wife served the pie, she cut it into 36 large pieces. Holy Apple Orchids! Did she really expect everyone to consume three pieces of pie? Well guess what? They didn’t. Now we had 24 slabs left. I guess we’ll eat the rest on fireworks night as well.
So for the fourth straight year, JoAnn lost the battle of the leftovers on Black Friday. She was right about the quality of the food, but I was right about the quantity. She never congratulated me, but did say since I was an expert on holiday dinners, I could try my hand on cooking Christmas dinner.
She knows that my family will be at the house for Christmas and she is also aware that I don’t even know how to boil an egg. Every morning she asks me what I will be cooking for Christmas. And every morning my response is the same, “TBA.” She is dying to know when I will be making the announcement. Little does she know, that I’ve been telling her all along. TBA: turkey, beets and apple pie.
