Remembering Working in Restaurants on Thanksgiving

Before I got into radio, I used to work in the restaurant industry in my hometown of Carbondale. The one restaurant I worked at was a family restaurant and it was open every year on Thanksgiving. For some restaurants, Thanksgiving is one of the busiest days of the year. Let's face it, cooking that huge meal is a pain in the butt so a lot of people avoid it by going to a restaurant.

We would start cooking the turkeys two days before Thanksgiving so we would be able to cut them up, portion them off, and have them ready to go. We would get full families coming in for dinner and most of them would just order the turkey. Being that it was already cooked, cut, and portioned, all we had to do is heat it up, throw it on top of some stuffing, slap some mashed potatoes on the plate, cover it in gravy and it was ready to go. But it never failed, somebody at the table would want something else besides the turkey dinner.

We would  serve so many Thanksgiving meals, that by the time you got done working, you didn't feel like eating turkey by the time I got home. But, I would come home after work, smelling like turkey gravy, take a shower, then I would force down the Thanksgiving Day meal that my mother made every year. I had to. It's my favorite meal of the year, and my mother was an awesome cook. I didn't really care for working on Thanksgiving because it meant that I wasn't spending the holiday with my family.

I did get a good feeling when I was done knowing that I helped hundreds of people enjoy their Thanksgiving even though it ruined mine.

Just do me a favor, if you plan on going out for Thanksgiving dinner instead of cooking it at your home, be kind to the employees that are working, because they would much rather be home with their families.