Thanksgiving oops

This was expected to be a goof-free Thanksgiving for me. All I had to do was show up at my family's with pumpkin bread, something I have been making since the Pilgrims had their first feast. There would be no turkey to accidentally roast with the giblets still inside. No lumpy mashed potatoes. No lumpy gravy.

I hadn't counted on the cranberry sauce.

It's tough to imagine how one could mess up cranberry sauce, especially when it is canned. But that is exactly what I did.

I was handed a can opener, two cans of cranberry sauce, and a bowl. I applied them to one another, in the order given, but found that the cranberry sauce was dead set against exiting the can. I therefore searched for a spoon to give it some encouragement. My encouraging ministrations were interrupted by a blood-curdling scream, which, had it occurred in the days of the Pilgrims, would surely have put an end to Thanksgiving then and there. The can was yanked out of my hands. A menacing male family member, The Protector of Cranberry Sauce, turned almost as dark as the sauce and began hastily stuffing it back inside the can, as if I had unleashed something malevolent and Armageddon would soon follow. He glared at the spoon in my hand as if it were a creature of evil.

"Bottom!" he finally managed to blurt out. "You're supposed to open the bottom! Then you slice it!"

This did nothing to illuminate the problem for me, and I turned a confused look on The Protector of Cranberry Sauce.

He looked around wildly for the can opener, turned the second can upside down -- apparently, it was too late to do whatever he wanted to do to the first one -- and stared at it. I stared, also.

"Well," he said. "I guess this bottom doesn't open."

Slowly he deflated. He began to explain, dejectedly, that the idea with canned cranberry sauce was to open both ends -- why, I never did fully understand -- and plop the sauce out into the bowl all in one piece. Then it is sliced.

This seemed very primitive to me. "That's not cranberry sauce," I said. "That's cranberry blob."

The Protector moaned. "Didn't you ever have cranberry sauce?"

No. No, I hadn't. It was the one Thanksgiving food that I studiously avoided, on the basis that it contained no recognizable ingredients.

Resigning himself to the ruin of the cranberry sauce this year, he handed the can back to me and, with a little sigh of regret, instructed me to carry on as I had been.

I didn't have the heart to tell him the Pilgrims never ate canned cranberry sauce.