Tradition

There is a three-year long, ongoing debate in our household and it is an intense one at that. Politics you think? Favorite past presidents? Which candidate had the best tax reform policies??? No....keep guessing. How many pugs is too many pugs in one household, you think? Nope, that's not it either.

No folks, it concerns dressing. The kind served at Thanksgiving. More specifically, how to make it, who makes it best, what ingredients must and must not be used in the aforementioned dressing. (Please note, I have always called it stuffing, but my loving husband has always called it dressing and due to the nature of the rest of this blog post, I will refer to it as dressing.)

I have to tell you, before I met my loving husband, I never gave much thought to stuffing- er, dressing. Each year it was served along side the turkey and I always took a spoonful or two and moved on to the sweet potato casserole and then jumped past the rest of the vegetables to make my way to the pumpkin and pecan pies. One slice of each please, thank you. But to my loving husband, it is not the pies that make Thanksgiving. No no. It's the dressing. And more specifically, the CORNBREAD dressing.

I distinctly remember the first year we decided to join forces and confirm our couplehood and spend the holidays together. Sure, we had dated five years at that point and I still hadn't met his family, but I digress. We opted to try to keep traveling to a minimum, thus we would spend Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with his. We would switch holidays the following year and so on on so forth. I was giddy with excitement to introduce him to my family's wild and wacky traditions. But, at my parent's suggestion, we offered to introduce a tradition of his family's to our own family so it would still seem like Thanksgiving to him.

When I asked him, "Does your family have any traditions you would like to celebrate with my family this year?"

He promptly responded with a question, rather than an answer. " Well, what type of dressing do you all make?"

"Um, what type? Well, we have regular dressing and then my dad always makes a small pan of oyster dressing because he is the only one who likes it. Do you like oyster dressing?"

"No, Lisa, I mean do you all make cornbread dressing or wheat bread dressing?"

"Um, I have no idea...."

I was greeted by stone cold silence as a look of horror began to rise in his eyes.

"You don't know? I have to have cornbread dressing. I can't believe you all don't eat cornbread dressing. Wheat bread dressing is for Yankees. I have to have cornbread dressing at Thanksgiving."

I am paraphrasing here, but I recall the conversation pretty well. Needless to say, the next day I received an email in my inbox and it contained a recipe for cornbread dressing which was forwarded to me by my loving husband's mother, with the words "No pressure" lovingly typed in the subject line. I still have the email.

The week of Thanksgiving, I carefully picked out the ingredients just as they were listed on the recipe I had been sent. The morning of, I got up early to make the cornbread dressing. Which by the way, you have to make the cornbread first and then you crumble it all up and put it in the dressing. Kind of double duty there, but whatever. I was so proud of my masterpiece and I thought it smelled pretty good. I brought it over to my parent's house and it was served next to the turkey as it has been done for years. I asked my loving husband if he liked it and he responded with, "it's great!" Success! Or so I thought.


As I mentioned before, we spent Christmas with his family that year. At some point during the evening, the topic of cornbread dressing came up again and my loving husband went on a tirade about how he didn't understand how my family could eat wheat bread dressing and how sad we must be that we hadn't experienced cornbread dressing until this year. It was at this point that my brother-in-law, not knowing what he was about to get my loving husband into, said," Oh, I heard you told mom that the cornbread dressing wasn't very good this year."

Steam began to come out of my ears as I turned to face my loving husband. He stumbled to make some sort of excuse about how there must be a misunderstanding. But, alas, I knew the truth. He had hated my cornbread dressing.

Fast forward one year (last year) - because of our agreement, he got Thanksgiving with his family and I got Christmas with mine. No problems there, folks, his mom made the cornbread dressing. And I am sure he thought it was delicious. Fast forward another year and here we sit, just weeks before d-day. I get Thanksgiving again this year. And I am refusing to make the cornbread dressing. Being the loving husband that he is, he has tried to reaffirm me and tell me how great it was and how he doesn't know what his brother was talking about and he would love for me to make the dressing again this year. But, my stubbornness can be pretty mighty. And I am not making the cornbread dressing. My loving husband is threatening to drive home to pick up the cornbread dressing his mother will make for him and bring it to my family's house. And thus the debate continues...