The Other Holiday Turkey

There are times when, for Thanksgiving or Christmas, I bake two turkeys.

One is the two-legged kind, the stuff of wishbones and drumsticks--the kind whose rich broth makes possible classic holiday fare like homemade noodles and dressing and giblet gravy. The other is my famous Brownie Turkey Pizza.

The recipe for the latter has been a staple of my recipe box--and of our family holidays--for nearly twenty-five years. It came my way via my hometown newspaper sometime in the early 1990s, one of those things I clipped out because it looked like something fun that the kids might like.

Basically, the Brownie Turkey Pizza consists of a boxed brownie mix prepared according to package instructions and baked at 350 degrees on a round pizza pan for twelve or thirteen minutes. When it has cooled, icing, nuts, and candy pieces give it its "turkey" design:

As you see, brownie toppers consist of generous portions of pecan halves, chopped Butterfingers (or walnuts--or both), and M & M's (or Reese's Pieces). These are arranged into turkey formation atop a still-gooey layer of canned chocolate and vanilla (for the head and neck) frosting.

Forming the turkey's beak and wattle are a single piece of candy corn (or a pecan half will work) and a small length of some sort of red gummy candy. Among other choices, you can enlist a gumdrop or a gummy worm for this purpose. This year I sliced the center out of a gummy spider I found at the after-Halloween clearance sales.

A couple tips make the decorating process easier and the outcome more successful. One is to make a pattern (approximately 4" by 6") for the head/neck unit by folding a piece of paper double and cutting freehand until you get about the size and proportions you want. 

Then, lay the pattern on the brownie where you want the head to be, and trace around it with a toothpick. Finally, if you apply the white frosting first, it will not be so likely to get swirls of chocolate in it.

From experience, I have learned that, once the frosting is in place, it works better to add decorations from the outside in. Doing this gives you a better chance of giving your feather structure a round, rather than more oblong, appearance.

Finally, be ready for a fight over the gummy worm or whatever you use for the wattle. No matter how many delicious morsels of M & M's or Reese's Pieces you use, and no matter how thoroughly you saturate the empty chocolate icing spaces with crumbled Butterfingers, every kid at your party is going to want that one irresistible piece of gummy candy.

I have found this to be true through two generations of turkey-eating children, and nothing I have witnessed hints that a change is imminent. It is simply a rule of the universe, and you just have to accept it.

The recipe I clipped from the Sedalia Democrat newspaper (adapted from a source titled "My Own Creation!") so many years ago is yellowed and chocolate-stained. Nevertheless, it has provided the blueprint for more turkey brownie pizzas than I can remember.

This past Thanksgiving is no exception, and, for posterity, let the record show that this year it was Sooby who got the wattle.

Christmas Gothic

When it happened last year, I thought it was just a fluke. Surely, I thought, we would do better this year.

But, despite our high hopes and best efforts, the unhappy reality of the situation has only been confirmed: It is impossible to get a good Christmas card photo with six little kids involved. There are simply too many eyes to keep open, moods to appease, and heads of hair to run a comb through all at once.

Up until last year, our annual Christmas card photo had posed no problem. In fact, the year before that, we had successfully added both Beenie and Zoomie to the mix without incident. Apparently, however, the addition of that sixth little body complicates things (through no fault of the baby himself, of course). It is the sole piece of evidence needed to prove the validity of chaos theory.

Indeed "chaos" is the only word that describes the five minutes immediately preceding the flash that added our Christmas 2013 photo to my iPhone camera roll. I will remind you how that ill-fated photographic specimen turned out:

Here, in a shot I will title Christmas Gothic, everyone is visibly unhappy and all for different reasons. At the top of the stairs Pooh and Sooby cannot agree on who gets to hold the bigger part of the stocking, so they are mad at each other. So much for my costuming efforts with Santa hats and red mittens.

In front, Bootsie is aggravated because we are crowding our photo session in right before lunch. She is hungry and wants to eat. Left of her, Beenie perches sullenly on Pa-pa's lap. In his defense, I have to admit the surly look is not entirely unjustified. In the moments just preceding, Beenie's mama attempted to confiscate both his sippy cup of milk and his pacifier.

Although she successfully commandeered the cup, we had to leave the pacifier in the spirit of compromise. Shrill squeals, we quickly learned, reverberate most unpleasantly in the close confines of a stairwell. (These account for Pa-pa's dazed expression,)

Meanwhile, Zoomie, in the center, marshals his cat-like reflexes and seizes the opportunity to grab the aforementioned sippy cup. Normally, this shouldn't pose a problem. But Zoomie is very allergic to dairy products and begins to feel nauseated. You will notice that, wisely, none of us chooses to sit directly in front of him.

Baby Heero, barely a month old, just wants to sleep. Quite understandably, he is unhappy with the noise and the jostling and the general melee. You will notice that I am the only one smiling--"grinning like a possum," Pa-pa would later say--apparently oblivious to the goings-on around me.

So you can see why, this past Thanksgiving weekend, I had high hopes for our 2014 picture. Everyone would be a year older, and the whole process should go more smoothly. That seemed to be the case, until we all took a closer look:

Sooby, it seems, thought it would enhance the photo if she appeared to be asleep. So, in the midst of a gargantuan effort to make sure sixteen eyes are all open in the same split second, Sooby closes hers on purpose in order to look like she is sleeping. Oh well. I guess she does look rather angelic.

And so, in this 2014 Christmas season, Pa-pa and I present to you our official holiday photo with this colorful little string of Christmas lights that illuminate our lives all year long. Sooby, our oldest, is already asleep, waiting for Santa. If you look very closely, I am sure you can see visions of sugar plums dancing somewhere in the vicinity of her head.

Cousins

I pause this Thanksgiving night to think about the sheer blessing of what I experienced today. No, it was not the day you probably expected me to talk about, wrapped in the lively but wonderful chaos that my six little grandkids bring to any celebration. That will happen tomorrow.

Instead, I spent today in the laughing, loving bosom of my extended family--a gathering of some fifty or more of us representing five generations of descendants from my paternal grandparents. In that family, I fall in the chronological middle of fifteen grandchildren, as my dad occupied the middle spot among the seven siblings of a Depression-era farm family eking out an existence alongside Flat Creek in Morgan County, Missouri.

I remember my dad once remarking that my grandma could not envision a world where cars would one day zoom across the country at 70 miles per hour. That makes me wonder if she would ever have imagined our gathering today, realizing the extent of the legacy she and Grandpa would leave in the generations to come.

Though the sheer number of us is impressive, I am much more taken by the fact that, as an extended family, we still gather together regularly, once for a summer reunion and again on Thanksgiving Day. In spite of the geographically mobile society we have become, most of us still show up for at least one of these yearly events if we can. So do many of our kids and grandkids.

We represent states as far north as Minnesota and as far south as Texas, and still we come together. We do this because we are family, and, simply put, we love each other. My cousins and I gather to renew early friendships forged climbing our grandparents' trees and playing in their hayloft. We have kept up with each other all our lives. I know many families who couldn't--or perhaps just didn't--do that, and I am sorry they had to miss this special brand of camaraderie.

Today nine of the fifteen of us, along with one older and three younger generations, shared turkey and the trimmings in a lavish and traditional Thanksgiving feast. When our grandparents passed away some fifty-three or so years ago, we were all children and teens--and one of us was not yet born. But here we are in all our turkey-stuffed, dessert-laden glory, in a rare shot captured by what seemed like a million cell phones all flashing at once:

In another fifty years my own grandkids will be nearing the age I am now. I can only hope for them the blessings that can be theirs only through nurturing the bonds that join an extended family such as mine. It seems that, with each subsequent generation, doing that in our world will prove to be an even greater challenge.

Don't get me wrong--our lives have not been perfect. Among us we have faced broken marriages, strained relationships, and job problems. We have endured the deaths of loved ones and serious illnesses among ourselves.

But through it all we remain a fan club that exists to cheer one another on through this life, and for that, on this Thanksgiving night, I am eternally grateful.

Bookends

The age span between the oldest member of our family and the youngest is eighty-nine years. As a family, our four generations span nearly a century, with birth years ranging from 1924 to 2013.

My mom turns 90 on Saturday, marking the beginning of her tenth decade on this earth. Just a couple weeks ago, little Heero, pretty well the only baby we have left after seven-plus years of rather rapid-fire grandkid production, blew out the single candle on his Old MacDonald cake.

The past two weekends, in a flurry of November pre-Thanksgiving celebrations, various components of our family have hosted two landmark birthday parties, a 90th and a first. Both were loving expressions of our gratitude for these two special family members, the oldest and the youngest, the temporal bookends between which all the rest of us fall.

Below, you see the guests of honor in a photo taken the day after Heero was born:

Of the two, of course, Heero has changed the most:

He is running around everywhere and doing some serious jabbering, much of it consisting of "bah"--which might mean ball or bottle or what a sheep says. Change the vowel sound to oo, and you have a pretty close approximation to cow language. It has been fun to watch what could be our last baby grow a personality and toddle along in the footsteps of his brother and cousins.

With Thanksgiving just a week away, I give thanks for the added blessings of this particular November: the long, healthy life of my mother and the year-ago arrival of this disarmingly charming little boy who came along in his own time, a couple years before the master plan dictated.

A week from tomorrow we will gather once again for Thanksgiving Friday. Framed by our two special bookends, we will once again unwrap the gracious gift of family and, I'm sure, find there many, many more reasons to celebrate.







 

The Many Faces of Halloween

One of the things I love about Halloween is its versatility. It does not restrict itself to certain mandatory activities like opening presents at Christmas, shooting fireworks on July 4, or cooking a turkey for Thanksgiving.

It also allows itself to be celebrated on gorgeous October days other than the 31st. That is especially helpful if distance and family schedules don't always allow Googie to see her kids on that particular day.

In past years the kids and I have embraced the Halloween spirit in numerous ways. When they were smaller, the older ones sometimes trick or treated on our subdivision, or we moved the festivities to the farm for a family wiener roast. Three years ago Sooby, Pooh, and I resurrected "Scarecrow Man" (see the post from Sept. 24, 2011) for the first time since my own children were younger.

This year our Halloween celebration took its spooky, fun-filled place a week early. When the kids got to Googie's last weekend, this is the list they found posted on the pantry door, giving them a variety of Halloween-themed activities to choose from:

Following is a pictorial chronicle of some our accomplishments. First, the foam Frankenstein crafts, followed by the poster-making, aptly demonstrated by Bootsie:

Then, on to the anatomy lesson afforded by our skeleton puzzle, a new-in-the-package garage sale treasure I snagged earlier in the month:

Our "spooky dessert" was a duet of chocolate cake and orange sherbet, but, sadly, it did not last long enough for me to capture digitally. The veggie skeleton, our contribution to a neighborhood wiener roast, fared better:

Finally, in time-honored Halloween tradition, we carved a pumpkin (facial features designed by Sooby and Bootsie). Although it wasn't on the list, Sooby decided a spontaneous toasting of pumpkin seeds was appropriate. (I had forgotten exactly how to do this, but we washed them, put them on a cookie sheet, sprinkled them with olive oil, shook on some seasoned salt, and baked them at 350 for about 13 minutes, turning once.)

The one thing I was looking forward to that didn't get done was wrapping the kids up like mummies in toilet paper, but we can always save that for next year. For several years I have also been saving a plastic jack-'o'-lantern leaf bag for the kids to fill--but I forgot to put that on the list, and we ran out of time anyway. Maybe next year.

Tonight my little spooks will be trick or treating in their home neighborhoods, and I will be home by myself dispensing candy to other little goblins--but that's OK. We have had a large dose of Halloween fun for this year, and October 2015 is just eleven months away.

Pumpkin Faces

I love the kind of stuff that stores put on sale after a holiday, and last year's Halloween clearance at our local Kmart did not disappoint. That is when I bought three wonderful bags of body parts.

By "body parts," I mean little plastic eyes, teeth, noses, and other colorful facial features. Their purpose is to make a Mr. Potato Head look-alike out of your pumpkins. The three bags, all containing different pieces, gave the kids and me several dozen objects with which to give our leftover pumpkins one last spooky hurrah. The results, as you will see, were quite captivating.

The pumpkin faces were funny enough in and of themselves. But before I snapped a photo of each child with his or her Mr. Pumpkin Head creation, I told them to try to mimic with their own faces the expressions they had created on their pumpkins. Here is what Sooby, Pooh, and Bootsie came up with:

There are two shots of Sooby because she was our most prolific purveyor of pumpkin art, and I just couldn't pick between the two. You can clearly see that the kids had a great time with our little post-Halloween pumpkin episode--but, in all likelihood, the one who had the most fun was Googie.

And now, off to the closet where last year's pumpkin-face parts are stashed in a three-pound plastic coffee container. There may be leftover pumpkins this year too, and I need to be ready.

Disclaimer: No pumpkins were totally demolished as a result of this activity.

Bootsie's Pink Lemonade Birthday

Even though I lived it over half a century ago, I remember many things about my childhood quite vividly. When it comes to the goings-on associated with specific birthdays, however, I remember very little, and there are no pictures to nudge my memory.

I have clear recollections of only my sixth and tenth birthdays. Mom threw a surprise party for my sixth birthday, and that was also the year I got to appear with Happy the Clown on "Birthday Party," a half-hour program broadcast from the TV station in our small town.

Specifically, I remember winning the game of musical chairs on that program and, secretly, lamenting that the grand prize--a large jar of peanut butter--fell a little short of the something more glamorous I had envisioned. But I got over it--and the peanut butter, I'm sure, glued together many pairs of square Krispy saltine crackers that summer.

I begged a long time to have a party for my tenth birthday, and Mom finally caved. At that one, I remember all my friends gathering around our dining room table while I opened presents--although the only present I can actually name is a Nancy Drew mystery book titled The Whispering Statue.

So, Bootsie, chances are, you may not recall much about the great time we all had at your house nearly three weeks ago on the day you turned four. That is why I want you to be able to come here to Googie's Attic years from now and see a little about what went on then.

First, you asked for a "lemon cake with pink icing," and your mama gladly complied. That day, Pa-pa and I picked up your cousin Beenie and made the three-hour drive to your house to watch you blow out your candles and share some "pink lemonade" yumminess. Here is what it looked like:

This dessert capped off a great menu, also chosen by you, of turkey, dressing, and sweet potatoes--a little preview of Thanksgiving that your daddy cooked up for us.

The unveiling of the presents came soon afterward, and you hit the jackpot this year. Pa-pa and I brought you a couple shirts, a Buttercup (a horse from Toy Story) flashlight, and a Lamb Chop puppet. Your great-grandma sent along a puzzle.

Mama put together the cutest assortment of playthings based on a Little Red Riding Hood theme. Along with a basket and the storybook, you got a reversible doll that could be the wolf, the grandma, or Red Riding Hood herself. The best part was this bright red cape that was just your size:

Another big hit was the Little Mermaid guitar that Beenie brought for you. While you spent a lot of time that night tripping your way through the woods to Grandma's, the rest of us pretty well fought each other for a turn at the guitar, which you are demonstrating here:

Sooby, Mama, and I even burst into a spontaneous rendition of "Dooley," a bluegrass song from the old Andy Griffith Show. Pooh caught us on video with my iPhone, but with any luck that particular performance may be lost over the years.

It was definitely a night and a party to remember, and it makes me sad to realize that as the years roll by, your own memory of this fourth birthday will likely grow dim. By the time you get to be my age, many years from now, you may not remember it at all.

So you will just have to look at these pictures, read this story, and trust me when I say that your fourth birthday was a wonderful time for our family. You were the queen of the evening, and it is an immeasurable blessing to see you happy and excited and thriving in your four-year-old element.

Happy Birthday, sweet girl. Your pink lemonade birthday will be a hard one to top.