The Amazing Flaming Centerpiece

The Amazing Flaming Centerpiece
Thanksgiving 2006

It was supposed to be a quiet Thanksgiving. All the kids had plans of their own and my husband and I were toying with the idea of going out of town over the holidays for the first time in 14 years. But within a week of Thanksgiving all that changed. Plans were cancelled and suddenly we were having 11 people over for Thanksgiving dinner. Four of which were children, two of which were under the age of two. Needless to say I began to scramble to put together a holiday feast for us all.

You have to understand that when I was growing up, Thanksgiving was a huge affair, with all of us (8 adults and 9 grandchildren) crammed into my grandparents’ tiny two bedroom house for a wonderful dinner. There were bodies everywhere it seemed and as the years passed and more folks (boyfriends, girlfriends, friends) were added, it was just more fun. But the burden of cooking a dinner for that many people did not fall solely on my grandmother. My mom and the aunts arrived early, carrying a variety of dishes to add to the basics. There were pies and cakes and green bean casseroles. Corn, banana pudding, jello salads and any number of delicacies to please even the most picky of eaters. My grandmother and later, my mother, were lucky in the fact that their offspring could cook up a storm.

It was also a different time. Children (adults and kids alike) were taught to help and some of my fondest memories are of the endless football games playing on the television while the gals put together a feast fit for the kings watching them. After dinner was spent in the kitchen washing dishes, telling jokes and laughing together. It was a magic time.

I wasn’t as lucky as my grandma and my mom. I had two sons – one of whom had married a woman who couldn’t cook (neither could her mom) and one who had an ex-girlfriend who had become an integral part of the family (she is the mother of three of my grandchildren) but who had nothing to contribute to the family dinner due to circumstances beyond her control. Add to this, the fact that neither of them knew what was expected of them while at my house for dinner and you have all the makings of Granny’s Stressgiving.

So, now that you know the background, here is the story. While planning this magnificent feast for friends and family, I made the huge mistake of asking my husband to help. My dinner went from being a simple meal set up in the garage (the only room in my house big enough for such a crowd) to being a color coordinated, Martha Stewart type Thanksgiving with matching plates, napkins and tablecloths and a beautiful homemade centerpiece constructed the morning of the event.

For starters, I put the 20+ pound turkey in the electric roaster at 6:00 in the morning. This was my first year cooking it this way and I had asked both my mom and my dad about actual cooking times (you KNOW the manuals are never correct). My dad had stated the turkey cooked in half the time but my mom insisted that it took as long to cook in the roaster as it did to cook in the oven. I deferred to my mom’s expertise and the turkey was done by 11:00. We were not eating until 3:00.

The tables were setup and my husband had constructed a beautiful centerpiece consisting of silk flowers and candles. Upon gazing upon this masterpiece for the first time, I expressed some concern that the flames from the candles would catch the foliage on fire. My husband assured me that the flames and heat would rise preventing this from happening. He finished setting everything up and I had to admit feeling a sense of pride that we would have this incredibly beautiful table to show to our guests.

Since we had invited my oldest son’s in-laws, I had asked that they bring the mashed potatoes. Because of my Fibromyalgia and arthritis this was the hardest part of the meal for me so it made sense to give it to someone else to do. Well, something must have been lost in translation because when they arrived, I was presented with a pot of uncooked potatoes. Everything was almost completely done and ready to set out, but now we had to wait for the potatoes to cook so we could have mashed potatoes with our meal.

I placed the pot on the burner and turned it on high. Almost immediately the burner began to smoke because a few crumbs of dressing had fallen into the burner pan below. Linda, my son’s mother-in-law and I began to laugh and blow on the burner pan to make the crumbs fall into the tray below the pan. It seemed to be working but then the smoke alarm went off. I hurriedly asked my husband to disconnect it because I knew there wasn’t a fire. It was just a little smoke.

But then my husband came back with a confused look on his face. The smoke alarm in the hall wasn’t the one going off. I thought for a moment and decided that since the garage was attached to the kitchen that it must be the one in the garage going off. I walked to the connecting door and peered through the glass. To my horror the entire center of my Thanksgiving table was on fire, with flames shooting about 2 feet in the air. I screamed for my husband who rushed past me. For a second he stood looking at the fire and then did the only thing he could with the only thing he had in his hand. He put out the fire with a bottle of beer.

I so wanted to say I told you so but the look on his face told me that this was not the time. We cleaned up the mess, made a big joke about it and proceeded to have a wonderful, if slightly smoky and cold Thanksgiving dinner.

That day will go down in history for our family as the day we missed out on America’s Funniest Home Videos. We had beautiful footage of the table before it went up in flames but I did not have the presence of mind to grab the camera while it was burning and being extinguished. Needless to say, Santa brought my husband a fire extinguisher for Christmas.