We Give Thanks

Thanksgiving in the Modica household is nothing short of chaotic. My mother willingly volunteers to host the smorgasbord every year, mainly because my grandmother gets Christmas and my aunt's idea of Thanksgiving is a pre-cooked turkey from Boston Market. The rest of our family, who live in Boston, spend Thanksgiving up north, leaving the remaining 13 of us to break bread and eat cranberry sauce together. Like I said before, my mom loves Thanksgiving, loves cooking it, loves smelling it, and most importantly, loves having sole claim on the leftovers. But the morning of that fateful Thursday, you'd think she'd been forced to prepare this meal at gunpoint.

"Everybody OUT of my kitchen!" she'll bellow one minute.
"Why is nobody helping me?" she'll scream the next.
"Get OUT OUT OUT!" she'll yell at my dad.
He retreats to the basement, aimlessly cleaning it up.
"ANDRE!" she'll holler down to my father. "YOU'RE NOT HELPING ME!"
He looks at me, exasperated, as only a man who thought he was following orders can.

And so it goes.

She claims to love the holiday, but she turns into a raving madwoman in the process of creating the food. I try to help, but I usually find myself kicked out of the kitchen as well. Usually, my job is the table. Now, we're normally a family of six. Add seven extra relatives to the mix, and something needs to be done about our table.

Here's what it looks like regularly:

 It's my job to unearth the four extra pieces of the table to make it look like this:

After all the bellowing and hollering has ceased for a little while, my grandmother decides to show up an hour and a half early, while my mother is still not showered, so the bellowing and hollering not only continue, but reach new decibels. My dad and grandfather race for the basement, plopping in front of the flat screen to watch the football game. I'm left taking shouted orders from my toweled and wet-haired mother, who needs to remind me to take out the sweet potatoes as the buzzer is blaring.

I'm sure you want to be around my family when Christmas rolls around.

"Don't forget to MAKE THE PUNCH!" she yells from upstairs.

Ah yes, the punch. My specialty. It's a Modica family tradition. It makes an appearance at every birthday party, graduation party, anniversary, Thanksgiving and Christmas we host. It's the most simple, crowd-pleasing thing we've ever made (much to my mother's dismay). There will be plenty of turkey and stuffing left over by the end of the night, but the punch bowl will be dry.

MODICA FAMILY PUNCH

Ingredients
1 liter of Sprite or 7UP soda
1 container of Berry Juicy Juice
1 container of strawberry sorbet, thawed a bit

Fill the punch bowl with ice cubes. Then add the entire container of Berry Juice and Sprite/7UP. Make sure the sorbet is soft enough, then dump it upside-down into the punch, making sure it comes out in a perfect circle. The sorbet will melt down into a white, tasty film that floats on top of the punch all night. Enjoy!