On Christmas Day my husband and I hosted 18 people for dinner. Dinner was scheduled for 2 PM.
At just after noon, when the potatoes were boiling on the stove and I was just starting to cook the green beans and carrots, my husband and I checked the two turkeys we’d been roasting.
The oven was cold; the turkeys were raw.
Oh, no!
Along with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, we started figuring out how to cook two 10-pound turkeys in less than two hours. Then we all started moving!
We unstuffed both turkeys and spatchcocked them (that was a new term for me: it’s when you cut the turkey down one side of the backbone) so they’d cook faster. We put one on the grill and put the other back in the oven—once it got up to 475 degrees—which seemed to take forever!
Then the temperature on the grill started going down. We were out of gas!
Luckily, my husband keeps a second full tank so we could switch out the empty tank for a full one.
Phew!
We sat down to dinner around 2:30, which seemed miraculous to me given where we’d been two hours earlier.
And the turkey was the best, most moist turkey we’d ever served. We’re going to do it this way forevermore! (Minus the last-minute mayhem!)
The reason I’m telling you this story is the comment my sister-in-law made after dinner was over and we were cleaning up.
She was surprised that my husband and I hadn’t been screaming at each other over who shut the oven off (we both remember putting the turkeys into a preheated over earlier that morning.)
Yeah, we skipped that part, I thought. We went right into crisis-management mode. On reflection, I’m proud of us for not letting the stress get to us. For my part, I really didn’t feel stressed. I thought, oh no, the turkeys are raw, what can we do? and so did my husband.
This is not to say that we never get stressed, that we never blame each other, because we do.
But blame doesn’t help. It doesn’t contribute anything except hard feelings and it doesn’t solve anything, so I’m glad we didn’t bother with it on Christmas Day.
I’m still working on the rest of the days of the year. 🙂
What do they say in school these days? “Practice makes progress.” I think that’s true. I’ve been practicing letting go of blame. Practicing staying present in each moment.
What was true at 12:30 PM on Christmas Day was that we had 18 people coming for dinner in a very short time and we had two raw turkeys.
We accepted that reality and moved on.
May we—all of us—let go of blame and continue to be present as much as possible as we start this New Year.