“Gizmo!” he shouts as the cat begins playing with some ribbon on the floor. “What the hell is the matter with you?”
The fuzzball ignores him completely.
Millie’s Elsa tree topper is the last thing to go on, and when we’re done, we step back to admire our work.
“It’s, uh, interesting,” Jensen says.
I tilt my head and take in the tree. Carson’s weird-ass penis ornament is all-too visible, as well as his Santa one. Between that strange mix of classic, family-friendly ornaments and a few additional less-appropriate ones, plus the lopsided shape of the whole thing, it sure isn’t the prettiest tree I’ve ever seen.
“It is what it is,” Zander declares, obviously done with this fucking tree. “Let’s just finish dinner, and we still need to wrap presents. We’ve only got a couple hours left.”
Fair. The tree is decorated and that’s what matters, even if it looks like it was done by a group of thirteen-year-olds.
“Okay.” I point at Zander. “You get the presents wrapped and the rest of us will go cook.”
“Works for me,” Zander shrugs, but he’s grinning in relief.
“Maybe I should help Zander…” Owen begins but I shake my head and cut him off.
“Not a chance. It’s all hands on deck in the kitchen. I’m just giving Zander slack because he almost froze his balls off outside.”
“Literally,” Zander grumbles.
“All right, fiiiine,” Owen sighs.
We return to the kitchen to salvage what we can of the meal. I work on the turkey, cutting past the charcoal outside to find as much edible meat as possible. Meanwhile, Owen and Carson peel potatoes and get them boiling. Jensen starts putting a green bean casserole together. We manage to make it ten minutes without any other disasters happening.
Then it all goes to shit.
“Fuck!” Jensen exclaims. “Why wasn’t the pepper’s top screwed on tight?”
We all look over and he’s holding a pepper shaker over the green beans. The top of the shaker has fallen into the casserole dish, and there’s a pile of black pepper in the middle of the beans. I wince and my tongue feels like it’s shriveling at the thought of eating that.
Muttering under his breath, Jensen sets the shaker down and scoops as much of the pepper pile away as possible.
Shaking my head, I try to focus back on digging meat out of the turkey, but then another issue pops up to distract me.
“Guys, did you know you need to leave these rolls out to defrost for, like, three hours?” Owen asks, shocked. He’s holding a bag of frozen dinner rolls he just pulled out of the freezer. “Why didn’t we pull these out earlier?”
“Can’t you just microwave them?” Carson shrugs as he grabs the potato pot to drain the water off them. “Defrost them that way?”
“It doesn’t work that way…” I mutter, but Owen’s already throwing the bag into the microwave. Okay. We’ll just see how that goes, I guess.
Focus on the turkey. Focus on the turkey…
Owen grabs a handmixer and turns it on high.
Shit, now what’s he doing?
“Hey, Owen, hold on…”
He doesn’t hear me over the sound of the handmixer as he plunges it into the pot of potatoes. He hasn’t even put milk or butter in with them.
The potatoes immediately start flying into the air.
“Shit! Fuck!” he shouts, jumping back, the mixer’s hands still spinning and flinging potatoes everywhere.
That’s it! I can’t take it anymore!
