Ham Sammich Heaven

Well, Thanksgiving rolled around again and the whole clan gathered under one roof for a bout of gluttony that will remain unrivaled for another year. Christmas dinner is nice but everyone spends all of their cosmic energy picking out the perfect gifts so there’s less enthusiasm for cooking at Christmas, leaving Thanksgiving as the ultimate meal of the year. Thanksgiving generates, nationwide, near-emergency-room level over-stuffing.

Interesting fact: the day you and I refer to as “Black Friday”, is commonly known in the plumbing trade as “Brown Friday”, the single most profitable day of the year wherein the average plumber may make as many as ten or twelve house calls with his/her trusty power snake.

This Thanksgiving we had ten people, not including my daughter’s six-month-old baby. Consequently, we opted to go buffet style and stack (and I do mean “stack”) everyone’s culinary contributions on the breakfast room table so we’d all have room to wedge around the dining room table. Still, the multiple desert dishes had to wait for some post-nap kitchen cleaning before there was room for them to be displayed.

All said, two young bucks had to eat their lunch on folding tv trays leaving elbow room at the big table for folks to wrestle with their piled-high plates. My two daughters and wife were also handicapped by their incessant need to hold and fawn over the baby during lunch. When I was a tot in the previous century, my mom just stuck me in the furthest bedroom and shut the door so my crying wouldn’t disturb the family pie-hole-gorging contest.

This year, I went out and puttered in my garage after lunch whilst the younger adults indulged in bourbon and televised football — I could hear their yelling even over my table saw. It’s not that I’m more industrious than the others but simply that my stomach hurt too much to lay down for a nap and my recliner was dead center of the bourbon/NFL arena, totally negating the napfulness of said recliner. Next year, I might move it to the garage before the clan arrives for Thanksgiving.

Admittedly, even though I was still stuffed after the football cacophony subsided, I did sneak back in and have one more, small piece of pecan pie. When the Apostle Paul wrote that whole thing about never being tempted beyond what you are able, I’m pretty sure pecan pie had not yet been invented. My kids would also probably claim that Paul never experienced the combination of Woodford Reserve and televised pro football — boy did they do some swearing.

Fortunately, we never had to call a plumber on Friday, and a handful of antacids had quelled my digestive earthquake on Thanksgiving night so Friday was a really good day. Jacob, my son-in-law helped me in the garage, and we finished cutting all the wood for a dining table I’m constructing. But even more important, all that hard work following a fairly restful (though drug-induced) sleep the night before, left my stretched-out stomach screaming for a good lunch.

There, in the back of the refrigerator, wrapped in sparkling gold foil and calling out my name in the sweetest voice you ever heard was a third of a spiral cut ham. Moreover, thanks to my wife’s girl scout training about preparedness, we had plenty of fresh bread, sliced sandwich cheese, and a new jar of mustard on hand. That may well have been the best ham sandwich I ever consumed.

The question is, “Why do we overindulge to such great lengths every Thanksgiving?” Is it a result of millions of years of hunter-gatherer evolution when scarcity was the norm, and our ancestors packed it in whenever they had the opportunity? Or is it a result of modern advertising aimed at our impulse-driven amygdalas?

Either way, you have to admit that a sandwich of left-over ham, consumed in the quiet of a lone recliner, amid a near-empty house with the tv turned off is awfully close to Heaven for a sinner who ate three pieces of pecan pie the day before.

A meeting of great minds who think alike