Thanksgiving at Home

It is Thanksgiving morning at the Barclay house, and something is missing. Jimmy shakes his big sister Donna awake, and she groans that she wants to sleep in - she was up half the night on homework, because her junior high teacher, Mrs. Thornton, has assigned everyone a letter to the person they are most thankful for, and Donna cannot make up her mind who that should be. Jimmy is not offended for long. He has noticed something stranger than a sister doing schoolwork on a holiday: there is no smell of roasting turkey in the house. Their parents are not up.

The mystery ends in their parents' bedroom. George and Mary Barclay have both come down with the flu overnight, and neither of them can stand up, much less cook. George offers to phone the Jacobs family and send the kids over there for the day, but Jimmy will not hear of it. He has been looking forward to this Thanksgiving all year - the turkey, the crackling fire, the parades on television - and he wants it here, at home, with his family. So Donna makes a decision. Their parents already bought everything. How hard can it be to fix their own Thanksgiving dinner?

Quite hard, as it turns out. The turkey is twelve pounds, frozen solid, and slippery enough that landing it on the counter leaves a crack in the Formica. Donna remembers that their mother thaws it in the sink overnight, which does no good at all on Thanksgiving morning, so the bird goes into the microwave instead - a very tight fit - for twelve minutes on high, one minute per pound, a rule the two of them invent on the spot. It does not thaw. Jimmy is sent to the garage for a hammer and chisel. Donna breaks one of her mother's knives on it. Meanwhile the stuffing turns out to be nothing but torn-up bread in a bowl, since neither of them can remember what else their mother puts in it, and Jimmy's mashed potatoes have gone straight into the mixer without being cut up first. The turkey goes into the oven with its legs pointing the wrong way and no stuffing inside, and Donna decides she will simply add that part later.

While they wait, Donna suggests they do something to cheer up the invalids upstairs, and tells Jimmy to think of an idea. He is delighted to be told he can think at all. Then smoke starts rolling out of the living room. Jimmy has stuffed three weeks of newspapers into the fireplace and lit them without opening the flue. Chased out of the fireplace, he tries to claim the traditional male privilege of watching football while his sister cooks, and Donna cheerfully bullies him back into the kitchen to open the vegetable cans.

By now the turkey is black on the outside and still frozen on the inside, the electric can opener has quit working, and nobody can explain any of it - until Jimmy finds a cookbook in the kitchen drawer. Donna reads the page on poultry and discovers that she has done just about everything wrong, starting with the five hours at 350 degrees the bird was supposed to have. Turning the oven up higher to save time seems worth a try. And when Jimmy grumbles about who started this whole holiday anyway, the word pilgrims jogs his memory of a school assignment, and he finally has his idea.

What their parents get, propped up on pillows, is a play: The History of Thanksgiving, written, directed, and performed with sound effects by Jimmy, with Donna helping. It carries the pilgrims from religious oppression in Europe onto the Mayflower in 1620, through four months of rough seas, onto Plymouth Rock, through a hard winter that takes almost half of them, into friendship with the Indians, and finally to Governor William Bradford's three-day feast of thanks to God for a bountiful harvest. The audience loves it. Mary says it was so real she could almost smell the food, and George adds that he can smell the fire too, meat burning over an open flame - which is when everyone realizes that nobody has lit a fire, and the turkey is the thing burning.

Dinner is pizza and canned chicken soup, and George prays over it, thanking God for His care all year long and for the love shown to him through his wife, his daughter, and his son. Asked whether it was a good Thanksgiving after all, Jimmy says he learned that it is not how you celebrate Thanksgiving but why, and that even with everything going wrong he felt genuinely thankful. He also learned that he never wants to do it this way again.

Later, scrubbing the last of the ruined pans, the two of them admit they have no idea how their parents manage this every year. Jimmy asks whether Donna ever wrote her letter. She did. Upstairs, on the nightstand, Mary finds it and begins to read aloud: Dear Mom and Dad.