Thanksgiving Turkeys

Whew! I am exhausted. Not from preparing a big Thanksgiving dinner. Laws no! M-O-O-N. That spells Hillbilly Mom is not a chef. My mom did most of the cooking. But I did help her out by eating. What I am exhausted from is laughing. My family is...how you say...crazy. Like off their meds crazy.

My mom started the ball rolling when we had a discussion of how HH is so thrifty that he is always picking up free stuff. After we were first married, when I still cared about pleasing him, I stopped my car in the middle of the road one day just to pick up a piece of J-channel. Never mind that I did not even know what I was picking up. I saw it, and thought, "That has something to do with the siding that we're putting on the house. HH will be OH SO PROUD of me." It was quite a long strip of flexible vinyl stuff. I bent and twisted it to shove it in my Nissan Sentra. HH was less than impressed. "Well, that's J-channel. But it's been run over so many times that it's not any good." So anyway, my mom told him she heard that Governor Blunt had told the police to be on the lookout for people selling copper to recyclers, because there had been a problem with electric wire being cut and stolen. But when she said 'copper', she looked HH straight in the eye, raised her eyebrows, and nodded her head once. It was kind of like when you have an inside joke with someone, except that she wasn't joking. It was like she was accusing him. Because he DID used to sell copper to the junk man, from wire that his old company took out and replaced. And the junk man took his name and address every time.

The next crazy was my niece, who told a tale out of church on her brother, who was once upon a time asked to read out loud for the Sunday School lesson. He came to the word 'gentiles' and read it as 'genitals', which was OH SO WRONG, but not as wrong as his sister exposing her brother's 'genitals in church' faux pas.

Then my sister got into the act by insulting TWO of HH's cars with the statement: "Do you still have that ugly yellow car?" To which HH responded, "It's brown, not yellow." Then the argument ensued over whether she meant the Pimpmobile, so named by her own self a few years ago, which is HH's copper-colored 1980 Olds Toronado, or his ugly boxy wedding-mint-yellow 1986 Mercedes. After clarifying that it was indeed the Pimpmobile of which she inquired, she further argued that 'they don't make brown cars anymore'. Of course, HH got it in his bull head to prove her wrong, and tried to fire up my mom's computer, which is a cast-off from the #1 son, so not state-of-the-art, and he couldn't get it going, so Mom had to do it. Then he yahooed instead of googled, and my niece had to take the driver's seat to run a search for him. Then they argued when he pointed out brown cars that she declared were not brown. OK, so the dark red was his mistake, but she disallowed beige, sandalwood, camel, sand, and mocha until he found one described as 'dark brown'. Then she said, "OK. I was wrong. They DO make new brown cars." The whole debate took up 45 minutes, while The Mayor blatantly took HH's side by naming off all the people he knew with brown cars. And I pointed out that my sister herself had owned a first car that was indeed a brown Chevy Nova. She disagreed and declared that it was a Pontiac Ventura, while not tackling the color issue.

Meanwhile, the #1 son was so hopped up on caffeine and sugar from Grandma's liberal soda policy that we were able to tell many embarrassing stories about him each time his vigilance flagged and he wandered away from the table.

All in all, it was a very good time. I am SO looking forward to Christmas.