Up To The Task

The Sartain holiday tradition is pretty standard fare. All of the womenfolk get together to plan and prepare the big holiday feast. The men eat the feast, then sit on the couch and sleep through an entire football game on television. It's been a great tradition for years.

I had no intention of breaking with tradition this year. In fact, I was just standing in the kitchen drinking a cup of coffee at the time. I should have known better. The Male Training Manual repeatedly exhorts husbands to keep moving to avoid detection. I just got lazy.

At the time, Lydia was in the kitchen with all manner of pots and pans scattered about. My presence in the middle of a cooking frenzy made me easy prey.

"What are you doing?" I asked casually.

"I'm fixing my special fruit salad dish for today's big get-together with your family," she explained while reading the cookbook, stirring, and measuring ingredients all at once. She calls it multitasking, and she explained to me how women are better at it than men. I would have argued the point, but I was already trying to stand up and drink my coffee at the same time.

"You sure are sweet," I offered, instead, hoping to use praise as a smokescreen to sneak out of the kitchen. Without acknowledging my comment, she wiped her hands off and told me, "I've got to run some errands so you'll have to finish up for me." She paused and smiled, "Then you'll be sweet, too."

As I watched her drive down the driveway, I considered putting my foot down on the importance of maintaining tradition. But again, it was more tasking than I could handle.

Being a red-blooded American male, I decided to rise to the challenge. But first I needed an apron. Looking around, the only thing I could find was a frilly little item closely resembling a negligee. The challenge was obviously daintier than I originally thought. Looking in the mirror, it occurred to me that I might want to counter balance the apron in some way. So I went and got my portable CD player and headphones and popped in my favorite heavy metal CD: Death, Destruction, and Doom. It balanced out my hormones nicely.

With the music blaring, I set about reading the recipe. The cookbook called for the gelatin to be "slightly chilled," then mixed with the other ingredients and carefully poured into the mold. I didn't see the point in all those extra steps so I jumped right to the mixing part "This stuff is easy," I congratulated myself.

Then I wondered about the meaning of "slightly chilled". "Chilled" has different meanings for men and women. My wife gets chilly when it's 85 degrees and a cloud blocks the sun momentarily.

The last time I got slightly chilled was while skiing on the top of a mountain with my father-in-law. It was windy, snowing, and 12 below zero when the chairlift broke down half way up. We both agreed that "chilled" was how we would describe the conditions that day.

Using that analogy, I popped the mold into the freezer to speed up the chilling process. While I waited, I felt like I could risk some multitasking so I turned on the television to watch the pregame show. Right in the middle of the show, I multitasked right into a nap.

I woke up just in time to get the mold out of the freezer and load the car. On the way over to the feast, Lydia asked how the mold turned out. I told her that it was a piece of cake. "Cooking is a snap. I don't see what the big deal is."

This year's feast was good as usual. And the giant fruit salad Popsicle was a big hit. Lydia was a little unprepared for my creation, but all the guys loved it. We took turns passing it around and licking it while lounging on the couch.

It helped keep us awake during the game.