Best holiday of the year

I am amazed. As I sit to write, it's not yet 11 o'clock this Thanksgiving Eve. I have baked cookies -- and by baked I mean added an egg and butter to the package mix -- prepared the first half of the cranberry salad (which must sit overnight), remembered to set out the yeast rolls and managed not to burn a chess pie. I've done more food preparation this evening than in the last, uhm, what year is it? I realize this is a paltry effort compared to, oh, most any mother with two good hands and a stomach. My own mom has probably been in the kitchen for 18 hours by now. BooMama has doubtless cooked enough to make Paula Deen weep.

Roy has injected a poor, defenseless turkey with Cajun garlic marinade, and we've set aside the neck and sundry other bird gut items for Mom to use in her giblet gravy tomorrow. Roy won't touch the stuff, but he's faithful every year to set it aside for her.

And here's the really amazing part: the house is pretty clean. And there's not one basket full of clothes waiting to be folded anywhere in this house. It's like an early Christmas miracle. The fact that I can say all of this before 2 a.m. is astonishing.

Tomorrow we'll load up sometime before noon and make the five-minute drive to Mom and Dad's house. Family I haven't seen in years -- the California Garrards -- will already be there. In fact, they're probably arriving at my parents' house as I type this. Not long after we get there, the Browns will arrive en masse*. They're family by choice, and we've been gathering for Thanksgiving as long as I can remember Thanksgivings. The only year I've ever missed was when Roy and I were living in Ireland. To my shock, the Irish don't observe an American Thanksgiving. Go figure. Although one pub we visited offered free buffalo wings that Thursday. Oh, yes. Guinness and dried-out chicken wings: We were one Wampanoag short of recreating Plymouth Colony.

I've always loved Thanksgiving. By the time I hit my mid-teens, I had decided it was better than Christmas. I love being around so many people I love, so many people who make me laugh, so many people who complain about the board games we always play. There will be incredible food, someone will bring wine in a box and insist it isn't that bad. Mom will pull out all her china and my grandmother's. The silver will be used. We'll run out of room and tables and tell the kids to quiet down. They won't.

After dinner, we'll gather all the food on the island in the kitchen and cover it with a clean tablecloth. Then we'll visit and laugh and not two hours will go by before someone pulls up a corner of the tablecloth and digs in again.

I love Thanksgiving.

-30-

* Writing en masse takes me back to a lovely time in my life as a journalist. Early in my newspaper career, I pulled a story off the Associated Press wire about some poultry disease spreading through Mexico. In an effort to stamp out the disease, the government was wiping out the entire poultry population. I used the story and, pushing deadline, hurriedly slapped on the headline, "Mexico kills chickens in mass." Probably somewhere in Haiti, there are people perfectly comfortable with this marriage of voodoo and Catholicism. But that wasn't exactly what I was going for. Y'all don't go killing any turkeys in church over the holidays. Trust me. It's frowned upon.