Happy turkey...um, day?

My friend is hosting Thanksgiving dinner. As is usually the case, she’s already thinking of the hoops through which she will be hurtling her body to please a husband, two picky kids who hate everything she cooks, a mother-in-law who follows her around so closely that when my friend turns around suddenly their noses hit, a step-father-in-law who has such a weird obsession with little stuffed bears that he brings them to her house and lines them up so they can watch him, a sister-in-law who is...ahh..."precise" in what she wants and the sister-in-law’s boyfriend who, my friend thought, was the easygoing, non-picky, non-precise member of the bunch.

Thanksgiving dinner requires a lot of planning under the best of circumstances, but in this case, there are a lot of dietary preferences and time of eating preferences and vegetable preferences and what to watch on TV preferences and what type of toilet paper she should buy preferences (not really, but there are a lot of opinions being bandied about).

So we were talking and she was telling me about all these people and all these preferences and I had to ask her about forty times to explain about the bears because it’s happened for so long that my friend has now accepted it as normal and I can’t explain that it’s far from normal that there are ten stuffed bears lined up on the dresser in her guest room.

Then, this:

Friend: My sister-in-law called me. The boyfriend has a request. Sort of a line-in-the-sand request.

Me: Yeah, him too? So what is it?

Friend: He needs to eat a happy turkey.

Me: A what? A happy turkey? Can’t you just get an expensive turkey?

Friend: No. Apparently there’s a movement toward happy food. And now I need to find a happy turkey.

Me: Like you interview them?

Friend: I guess. No turkey with postpartum depression or an anxiety disorder. Not one on Prozac, has to be happy.

Me: What turkey would be happy knowing his whole family will get beheaded in November?

Friend: A stupid turkey, I guess.

Me: Hey, that’s it. Be passive aggressive like me. Get a turkey that is happy but get a really stupid one. Or maybe one with multiple personalities. Just really screw with the guy.

Friend: Maybe I’ll find really mean potatoes. Or psycho brussel sprouts. Or depressed cranberry sauce.

Me: Use skim milk and margarine in the mashed potatoes. Then they’ll get all insecure and think you’re calling them fat. Then they’ll get a complex. And be COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES!!! Get it?

Silence.

Me: Or you could just drink. Then you’d be happy, regardless of how the turkey felt.

Friend: There’s that.

Wow. And I thought my husband’s family was weird. This happy turkey crap has them beat.