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This is a guest post by Caitlin Douglass, who does not have a blog of her own. Thanks for helping me out!
There’s a lot more to Thanksgiving than just the food. Sure, that’s the focal point, especially if you’re having the whole family over. Snacks to tide people over until dinner are essential. Then you have to try to accommodate everyone’s individual tastes and traditions (My mom always made oyster walnut cranberry truffle stuffing! It’s just not Thanksgiving without it! You know how to make that, right?). And after the meal, the pièce de résistance—dessert. You know just a simple pumpkin pie won’t suffice. If you don’t have at least three kinds of pie, ice cream, and some other sort of backup like frozen pound cake for your fussy aunt, you’re in trouble.
While you’re in the kitchen, wondering what possessed you to host the holiday meal this year, and sampling the wine to keep from bolting out the back door, keep your family and guests occupied. No, not by helping you in the kitchen. Are you kidding? Those magazine and television ads that show a happy group of ten people in one kitchen preparing Thanksgiving dinner together are a fantasy at best, mocking at worst. No, keep people out of the kitchen and out of your hair by sitting them down, and putting on something to watch that will keep them engaged, and keep you sane.
For The Men
Yeah, we’re going to get a little stereotypical here, but is it really a stereotype if it’s true? Men want to watch football on Thanksgiving. That’s all there is to it. Try and keep the TV off, or have it tuned to something other than football, and you’ll either get a bunch of sulky, sullen men, or you won’t see them at all because they’ll be spending Thanksgiving at one of the bars in town that’s open and has a TV. As tempting as that may sound, Thanksgiving is a family holiday, so you should all at least be in the same house at the same time. Keep the menfolk happy by getting ready for some football.
The networks are kind, and stagger the National Football League (NFL) games so everyone can see them all without flipping back and forth, thereby risking missing important plays. On Thanksgiving Day this year, the New England Patriots will be playing the Detroit Lions at 12:30 p.m., on CBS. Then the New Orleans Saints and the Dallas Cowboys will go at it on Fox at 4:15 p.m. Finally, the Cincinnati Bengals and New York Jets play at 8:20 p.m. That game is showing only on the premium NFL Network. Tip: Get a subscription to NFLN as an early Christmas present for your man so he doesn’t miss the game. Better tip: Save yourself some money because by 8:20 p.m., the tryptophan will have kicked in, and the men will be sound asleep in their chairs.
For The Kids
Yours might be one of those households that doesn’t have more than one television. While this is a good thing all year long because it can encourage your kids to actually go outside and get some exercise the way most kids did back in the old days, come Thanksgiving Day, if the kids in the house don’t have something to do, they’re going to drive you insane by tromping through the kitchen every five minutes moaning about how bored they are. Save your sanity, and their little lives by offering an alternative solution—the Internet.
Gather the kids around the computer, and then pull up a site like Yidio, which lets you search for movies and shows available all across the Web. You don’t have time to search each entertainment site individually when you have a turkey to baste, and a good bottle of wine breathing on the counter. Yidio lists more than 30,000 movies and 500,000 episodes of 5,000 TV shows, giving you quick and easy access to all kinds of free entertainment. Yes, free. The kids can watch Benji’s Very Own Christmas Story online, or episodes of That’s So Raven until it’s time to eat.
For the Women
We’re back to that stereotype, but while the guys are keeping score and doing chest bumps in the living room, and the kids are locked staying in another room to watch movies online, you and your girlfriends will probably spend most of the afternoon in the kitchen, preparing dinner, dishing on your significant others, and sharing that bottle of Pinot Grigio. Or maybe you just said the heck with it, went all out, and got a whole box of wine to share. Whatever your taste, it might also be fun to pull up a Lifetime Original Movie on someone’s laptop, and let it play in the background.
Lifetime keeps several of its original movies available to watch online. They’ll stay up for about a month, and then be replaced, so there’s always something new to see. Ok, let’s be honest. Movies like The Staircase Murders, and Secrets in the Walls aren’t exactly holiday fare. But when you’re having those moments where a house full of family on Thanksgiving is driving you up that wall full of secrets, and you’re contemplating a staircase murder of your own, you can look at the women in those movies and be reassured that things could be a lot worse. Your husband could unwittingly be married to your supposedly dead cousin’s sister. And that would just completely throw off the seating arrangements at your Thanksgiving dinner.
Christina Gleason