I'll be eating at Cheesecake Factory with my father and sister. Most likely I'll get the orange chicken.
It's not as pathetic as it sounds; here's the story. Until I was in college, my extended family celebrated Thanksgiving at my aunt's house (my mom's sister). When she died, my immediate family really had no place to go, so we figured we'd go out for dinner. As a joke, someone suggested Golden Corral, but it seemed to satisfy all of our different tastes, so we actually went there! And that was our consciously ironic tradition for the next decade or so.
In 2007, my mother died, and for Thanksgiving that year my father, sister and I went our separate ways, dining with our own friends. That ultimately didn't sit well with any of us, so the next year, we had dinner with my father's girlfriend's family. That would be Ellen, one of the best people I've ever met.
That judgment does not apply to all of her family, however, so we've settled on spending every other year with them. This is the year where we don't do that, hence our Cheesecake Factory plans.
Ellen is still my father's girlfriend, not his wife, because she's been separated from her gay husband for thirty years, but they haven't gotten divorced. I still haven't figured that one out. Everyone seems to be fine with it all.
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