My mother cried the first Thanksgiving she shared with my father. Just 23, she had spent all day baking pies hoping to impress the other side of the family. Then Patrick the cat jumped up on the kitchen counter and walked his little paws across all four of them.
"It's funny afterwards," she says some 50 years later, "but it's not funny at the time."
They call it turkey trauma, the stress that results when our best-laid Thanksgiving Day plans go horribly awry. For no other meal are our expectations so high. We labor over a menu, bring out the china, iron the tablecloth, light the candles. Then we expect people who specialize in pasta and takeout to suddenly channel Martha Stewart.
All conditions ripe for mini-disaster.
"It's an easy dinner to make," says Jan Pellegrini, owner of Tastebuds gourmet shop in Beverly, "but everyone freaks out."
For 27 years, Marge Klindera has worked the toll-free Butterball hot line on Thanksgiving Day, fielding calls from people in a panic.
"We have people, if not crying," she says, "it's certainly very close."
One year, a mother called because her toddler son stuffed his matchbox car into the stuffing and she wanted reassurance it was still safe to serve the turkey.
One holiday, hundreds phoned after they lost power with the uncooked bird still in the oven.
Without question, she says, the family dynamic raises the stakes. One time a newlywed called, speaking in a whisper, because her mother and mother-in-law had different ideas about how to cook the turkey.
"She was so relieved," Klindera says, "when what we told her matched what her mother had said."
John Keohane, owner of Henry's Market, puts his cell phone number on the store answering machine in the event of such culinary emergencies. Two years ago, customers from Manchester called at 6 in the morning Thanksgiving Day because they had forgotten to pick up their turkey.
"They were devastated," he says. He drove to Beverly to open the store.
At the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, staff sometimes must accommodate very last-minute reservations. One year, a family came to the restaurant after a flock of starlings ate the potatoes, the gravy, the stuffing and the vegetables that had been left on the deck to keep cool.
One friend told the story of how a young cousin accidentally locked the stove, which activated the self-cleaning function. The lock wouldn't release until the oven cooled down. The turkey — and the family — was held hostage.
A co-worker and her boyfriend had a turkey covered in gray soot after a grease fire. They wiped it clean with paper towels and didn't tell a soul until the meal was over.
Pellegrini of Tastebuds has the turkey thing down. But she did experience some hysteria of her own on Thanksgiving Eve. She had stored some of her customers' banana cream tortes in the back of her Mercedes and mistakenly left the door open. Her Westie climbed inside and ate the banana chips off the tops of every one.
"I died," she says, "I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown."
On my first Thanksgiving as hostess, I didn't call the Butterball hot line. I called my mother. At 6 in the morning.
In the course of all her helpful advice, she never mentioned the fact that you have to defrost the frozen turkey for several days in the refrigerator. We covered the removal of the giblets packet. We talked stuffing.
Thawing never came up.
So my husband and I took turns holding the 15-pound bird in a sink with cold water for about an hour and a half. Crisis averted. The dinner was delicious.
Who knows what disaster looms as I attempt take two on Thursday. Luckily, we don't own a cat. And, unlike my mother, I would never make a pie from scratch.
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To reach the Butterball hot line on Thanksgiving, call 800-288-8372.
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Staff writer Susan Flynn can be reached at sflynn@salemnews.com or by calling 978-338-2658.
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