Holiday Hell or Heaven

I'm never quite sure how to approach the holidays and the accompanying grandiose holiday meal. Seems I've been patient, overlooked and silent for, uh, decades at table now. And I've about come to the Shut Up I'm Going To Talk Now phase of life. This could end cordial relations with various and sundry relations for years to come if I take it too far, however.

Lordy though, if I have to hear, for the trillionth time, about how so-in-so in the forties did this or that bit of mediocre silliness during The War or at a dinner dance in the fifties, or the same tired old tale of how so-in-so used to be fat "as a child," I will surely not be able to sit still another century longer.

I got uppity last Christmas and asked a guest (who was dining with our family, bless her brave heart) loudly, while at the Big Meal, if one loopy aunty (there are plenty to go around) had shut her (the guest) up in the tack room yet and made her watch Charlotte Rampling films back to back. The aunty in question hasn't emailed me since.

Speaking of loopy relatives and mixing them all up just to see what happens at the big holiday meal, Garrison Keillor, the King of Geekdom fer sure, had a marvelous tale of a particularly memorable Thanksgiving dinner when he was a child -- The Thanksgiving Dinner When People Talked. Scroll to Segment 4 to hear it.