Never Mess With Thanksgiving Traditions

For generations, the most solid Thanksgiving traditions in the Landers family have been hunting and a feast of turkey.

Typically, the men of the family will leave early in the morning to decoy ducks, take a stand for deer or bust brush for pheasants while the women slave in the kitchen. We usually return home just in time to shower and poke our semi-clean fingernails into the freshly prepared hors d’oeuvres.

The women seem to prefer it this way. But I’ve suffered pangs of guilt about it.

Last year, however, I returned from a September trip to Alaska with a particularly bright, beautiful 12-pound coho.

At the risk of tinkering with tradition, I saw a chance to be a hero.

“Meredith,” I said to my loving and occasionally traditional wife. “You and your mom work so hard on holidays that you never have time to sit down. Why don’t I save this salmon and barbecue it for Thanksgiving this year?”

The odor of lemon and tarragon sizzling in mild apple-wood smoke would boost anyone’s holiday spirits, I explained.

“There wouldn’t be much to clean up,” I beamed. “You might even have enough time to sit at the table for the blessing.”

Secretly, I reasoned that grilling a salmon would be so easy I could still get in 5 hours of hunting before coming home and putting on the chef’s hat.

But outwardly, I beamed at the sacrificial and loving nature of this proposal.

I’ve always wanted to be a ‘90s kind of guy.

I braced myself, knowing that Meredith was going to come running across the living room, throw her arms around my neck and smear her unconventionally firm body tight against me in an appreciative embrace.

I expected to be kissed in a way I hadn’t experienced since she won the coin toss that left her tubes intact and sent me in for a vasectomy.

Instead, her face paled and she reached for the telephone.

“What are you doing?” I said, my arms still reaching out to hold her.

“Calling mom.”

She turned her back to me, bent her head over the phone and talked in muffled tones as though giving nuclear secrets to the enemy.

A half an hour later, Meredith put down the phone and told me, “We need to think about it.”

Weeks later, after countless further discussions with her mother, she said, “We’re still thinking about it.”

Indeed, she was so consumed by the prospect of tinkering with tradition that she couldn’t do ANYTHING but think about it.

The laundry went undone, the kids’ hair went unbraided, our love life was on hold and the phone bills to the in-laws farm house near Moscow were getting as thick as a Bill Gates tax return.

One day in early November, I got phone call from Meredith’s father, who said to wit, “What in the hell did you say to my daughter? This house is falling apart for lack of attention, and I’m not getting much attention either.”

Something had to be done, especially if I was ever going to get permission to shoot some of the pheasants then hang out behind my father-in-law’s house.

Lacking grace in these family situations, I asked my good friend and insurance agent J.F “Skip” Hensler what to do.

“Sounds like you need more disability insurance,” he said.

“The other thing you could do is bring the salmon to me. I haven’t been particularly successful this hunting season, and, well, I’ve always wanted to have something in my freezer.”

This wasn’t a bad tip. I thanked Skip and offered him five frozen pigeon carcasses I had used for retriever training. Predictably, he bristled at the offer.

“Can’t you come up with six?” he said. “Then I could bring friends over and tell them I bagged a limit of chukars.”

I drove home early that day and waited for my wife.

“Meredith,” I said as she came home from work. “I took a close look at that salmon and I think there’s a little freezer burn around the edges. The presentation quality isn’t quite what you’d want for Thanksgiving.”

She stood motionless and untraditionally speechless.

“I know this might disappoint you, but maybe we should save it for when some unwanted guests come, like your cousins or Skip Hensler.”

Meredith dropped her bags and reached for the phone.

“Are you calling your mother?” I asked. She nodded.

Minutes later, a great sigh of relief caused the drapes to billow and the fur on the caribou mount to stand up straight.

On Thanksgiving day, everything went according to tradition.

Meredith and I got up together at 6 a.m. She turned on the turkey roaster and I loaded the dog and shotgun into the pickup.

“Dinner’s at 3,” she said, throwing me a kiss from the door in a way I hadn’t seen since last Thanksgiving.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, ext. 5508.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review