Frumpy Mom: The Sunday after Thanksgiving is official light-hanging day

So it’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and some of you may have lived through it and come out on the other side. Men, this means you. Because the women are still washing dishes and putting them away, while trying to figure out what to do with the leftover turkey.

Meanwhile, your Thanksgiving hangover consists of being annoyed that your favorite football team let you down, and that all that washing going on from the kitchen made it hard to hear the game.

That’s OK, because today is your day in many homes across America. That’s right. Today is when you will balance precariously on a rickety ladder and put up your Christmas lights.

Yes, the women in your house could actually do this job, since their work shopping, planning, cooking, serving and cleaning up from Thursday’s feast is over. Mostly. But they took a vote in the house and it was decided that, once again, those of you with a Y chromosome win the exclusive right to do it.

I really would implore you to be careful on that ladder, because I’ve had not one but two friends fall off their ladders and break their patooties. Holidays with broken bones are not fun. At our house, we no longer hang lights from the eaves. We run the lights along the planter in front of the house. This minimizes the potential doctor’s bills.

As an aside, last week, when I was watching a couple of young manly friends hang lights for me, I noticed a bunch of small holes dug in my small lawn. Yikes, I thought. Were those gophers? But then the holes seemed to disappear. What does that mean? I support the right of gophers to live their lives in comfort, but they need to do it on my grumpy neighbor’s lawn, not mine. I will be happy to escort them over there. In case I need to know, what do gophers eat?

Thanks to the aforementioned young manly friends, I now have a lovely display of white lights on the front of my house. My son, Cheetah Boy, is home from the hospital and assisted living, but since he’s still on crutches, this year he got away with just watching. I, of course, was supervising the operation. That’s what I do these days. I supervise.

I bought these new LED white lights that look really pretty, but they’re so bright that they light up my bedroom at night like an airport runway. I’m getting used to sleeping that way, knowing it’s only temporary.

As I mentioned, the No. 1 son is finally now home, after his Sept. 7 motorscooter accident that left him with more broken bones than a leftover turkey.

I love my son and I enjoy having him back at home with me, especially because he can reach those tall jars in the kitchen that elude me. However, I did go two months without him, and during those two months, no forks disappeared from the kitchen, never to be seen again.

No towels took up permanent residence on the bathroom floor. No glasses and dishware piled with old food ended up on his bedroom counters. No hoodies and sneakers were thrown on the floor of our foyer, to live there forever. No one decided to cook a steak and left the empty wrappers on the kitchen counter and the dirty frying pan on the stove.

Lord knows, I’m no neat freak. But I would like to get at least three feet inside my door before I start seeing dirty clothes on the floor.

I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving. These days, our feast of thanks takes place at a nice restaurant, which means no shopping, no cooking and no cleaning up. Sadly, though, it also means no leftovers, which are the best part about Thanksgiving. Well, except for the pumpkin pie. I like to buy the giant ones at Costco.

I love to cook and enjoy making a holiday feast from scratch. However, no one else in our small family likes to cook, and it’s just no fun to do it by yourself.

One year, I insisted the kids wake up early with me to prepare the Thanksgiving meal, thinking it would be a lovely and touching experience of family bonding.

It was a lovely and touching experience of people getting on each others’ nerves. The young people acted like they were being waterboarded when I asked them to chop celery for the stuffing.

They rolled their eyes and groaned when I showed them how to use a potato masher.

All this did was make me envious of families that seem to enjoy doing this together–or of families that don’t have kids.

So, that’s why we go out to eat. We can all agree on one thing: It’s nice to sit down at a table with a white linen cloth and be waited on by friendly servers. It’s nice to have turkey that someone who is not you has slaved over to perfection. (I used to eat only whole plant foods, no animal products for my health, but that doesn’t count on Thanksgiving. Calories don’t count, either.)

It’s nice to come home to a house that might not be the height of cleanliness and order, but it doesn’t have a sink full of roasting pans and dishes.

I hope your holiday was nice as well.

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