A Thanksgiving Story . . . more than a week later

By now, the Thanksgiving leftovers are long gone and everyone has moved on to Christmas.

But wait! WAIT! I never shared my Thanksgiving story. I never told you all how Thanksgiving morning - four hours before 11 people were supposed to show up and expect a turkey and all the trimmings on a lace tablecloth with damask napkins and four kinds of homemade pie - the pluming in our house IMPLODED.

Seriously.

I walked up the hall at 8 a.m. and there was Mark, standing over a toilet with water filled Right. Up. To. The. Brim.

So I did what any hostess would do under the circumstances. I left the house to run a Turkey Trot 5K while he tried to snake out the clog.

(And I need to mention here that my mother-in-law arrived Wednesday night to get dinner going in the morning so that I could run in said Turkey Trot. She rocks).

But I digress.

So I go off to trot with the turkeys and give the home situation very little thought. After all, I have two young children who use 17 times the toilet paper necessary every time they sit their dainty butts on the loo. I assumed (and you know what happens when you assume) that the problem would be rectified toot sweet.

Except, it wasn't.

When I arrived home 90 minutes later, the first thing I saw was Loaf, fully dressed. The second thing I saw was the back of the van wide open and loaded with suitcases. Oh. Crap. (Not literally, but close enough).

Mark met me at the door and explained that every drain in the house had stopped working. Nothing was going down anywhere. And to make things even more fun, water was pouring out of the ceiling in the garage.

Awesome.

Fortunately, my brother- and sister-in-law stepped up to the plate and Saved Thanksgiving! Unfortunately, they live an hour away.

Have you ever moved an entire Thanksgiving feast an hour away on Thanksgiving day? Well let me tell you, it is quite the feat.

My mother-in-law had already taken the bird and left because getting that sucker in the oven was of primo importance. None of us really wanted to eat dinner at 9 p.m. In the meantime, Mark and I packed up the rest of the food: trays of sweet potatoes, pies, potatoes for mashing, a huge salad, a vat of salad dressing, as well as all the condiments, sauces, spices, beverages and trimmings we'd need for the meal.

And in what can only be called a Thanksgiving miracle, we managed to remember everything but a few pears I was going to slice and toss into the salad (it didn't need them anyway).

We then drove both cars (so Mark could come back at the crack of dawn to meet the plumber on Friday) to the relative's house.

Thanksgiving was a resounding success and the next day we found out that the problem was just a tree root that had grown into one of the main pipes. (Nice timing tree. Really. Thanks a lot).

But all in all, it could have been SO MUCH worse. We may not have found a backup host so quickly. It could have happened AFTER the guests arrived. It could have been thousands of dollars in repairs. So overall, I ended up being pretty thankful anyway.

OK. Phew. Got that one in. On to Christmas . . . .