The Recap

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Pretty funny how a Christmas celebration goes when you're trying to feed about 40 people.

My beautiful wife said that we'd eat at 5:00 so I worked towards that goal. Of course, at about quarter to five about 20 little kids broke into the room where I was cooking and started playing in front of the oven.

You can't yell at someone else's kids and not feel like a dopey bastard...so I grabbed my wife:

"Get them the hell out. Three-thousand square feet and they gotta' stand on my feet."

They were gone.

I had the food ready at exactly 5:00.

Pasta, ham, turkey, brocoli, cheese & rice (thanks Lorie), stuffed peppers (thanks Mike), mashed potatoes (28 pounds of them!), rolls, salad.

Everything hot at once.

And the line shuffled along and I waited it out.

Then I grabbed a plate and headed up there.

"Damn, the food is good," I said as I was eating.

That's the way to know how it is when you cook it yourself.

Eat it. If it's good to you, it's good to them.

And it was.

I enjoyed my twenty minutes of sitting and then it's all about...

...putting the food away and cleaning the roasters.

(I feel for you, Pops, all those years of cooking!).

Again.

Kids in the way.

The little bastards can move!

And I don't know any of their names.

"Who's kid are you?" I asked one of them.

He punched me in the nuts.

I started cleaning up.

My nephew Matt chipped in.

We had it all in containers for the late arrivals to grab in a matter of minutes. I cleaned all the dishes and put as much away as I could.

"Where have you been?" My sister-in-law asked. "Sit and talk to us!"

I passed my wife somewhere along the way.

"How's it going?" she asked.

I laughed.

By the time the last guests had cleared out, the house was clean.

"We gotta' put the tables away," I said.

"Tomorrow," Kathy replied.

We put on an episode of Dexter.

By then I was in the mood to root for a serial killer.

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