I once walked in on my mother sitting at the kitchen table looking exhausted.

“Hi, Mom. You look tired.”

“I’m beat. Do you think we need baklava?”

I looked around at the pies and cakes covering every surface. “How many pies do we have?”

“I don’t know; I lost count. Fifteen maybe? And then there’s the plum cake, the triple chocolate cake, and I have two cheesecakes and the cream horns in the fridge.”

“Mom, there are only five people in our family. I think we’re good.”

“And Omi and Opa,” Mom replied.

“I still think you’re OK.”

“Stop that!” Mom said, slapping my hand away from the peach pie. “I don’t know. I invited the crazy man down the street. And Helmut and Janet might stop by in the evening …”

“But …”

“And I have that puff pastry. I don’t want that to go to waste.”

“But …”

“I’d better make it. Hand me that bag of walnuts.”

I gave it up, handed her the walnuts and went to bed.

The next day after dinner, as we all lay around like a pile of overfed sea lions on the beach, Mom came wading into the middle of us. “You need to try the baklava,” she’d say menacingly, holding a piece under my nose. “You surely want some!”

I surely was wondering if we had a stomach pump in the medicine cabinet, but it was always this way at Thanksgiving. Mom, having spent many of her formative years starving in post-war Germany, never got over the wonder of food during the holidays. So if a dish could be made, it would be made. Except for pecan pie. I don’t know why, but we never had pecan pie. Probably she thought it would be too fattening.

Now, things are much worse. My family is still small. But gluttony is my favorite vice, so Thanksgiving has gotten even larger (to, ummm, honor Mom’s memory, of course).

I tell you this so that you will understand the magnitude of the calamity that befell us last year. My daughter’s house is more central, so we were having Thanksgiving there. Since it was her house, I insisted that it was her job to get up at 6 a.m. to put the turkey in the oven. Too tired after our cooking marathon to argue, she accordingly got up at 6, put the turkey in and went back to bed. When I got up a few hours later to baste the turkey, I discovered that it was still stone cold. The oven was turned on but there was no heat. It couldn’t be broken! How could it be broken? I informed the fates that this kind of unrealistic disaster only happens on sitcoms, not to real people. The fates just replied, “Ha ha.” After many phone calls and failed attempts to resuscitate the oven, we were forced to declare it dead. Our cooking frenzy the day before had broken its spirit. Now what?

In the end, my sister Lisa saved the day by offering her house for the feast. We had already decided that the turkey was cold enough that salmonella wouldn’t be a problem. Probably. We pushed Thanksgiving back to dinnertime hours, rather than our traditional lunchtime, and with many trips, moved what amounted to the entire contents of a restaurant supply store and a mid-size grocery store to her place. It looked like an army of refugee chefs had just moved in.

This was one Thanksgiving where I probably looked just as tired as my mother used to. But also like Mom, I had a great abundance of desserts to soothe my soul. I felt comforted. Also, I felt extra thankful. For many years, we lived far away from family. But here I was, surrounded by people who, for all their quirks, at least would never dream of questioning the pie-to-person ratio. But there was no pecan pie. I still don’t know why. We all like it. Just as well, though; it’s fattening.

Anneli Byrd is an academic adviser in Weber State University’s Student Success Center.

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