LIFE

Frugal #wins and #fails: A Thanksgiving retrospective

Abbey Roy

A belated welcome to December, dearest readers. The Bargain Advocate sincerely hopes this finds you well and in the Christmas spirit and not too tired of “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” because you’ll be hearing it on the radio for the next three weeks.

Sorry to disappoint.

In all this talk about Black Friday and Cyber Monday and Cyber Monday Part Deux (so basically the rest of November), I forgot to let you know that Mr. Roy and I mostly-successfully hosted Thanksgiving for the first time, and we still have turkey in the freezer to show for it.

We ended up eating no sooner than an hour and a half after we promised, but the turkey was delicious, my make-ahead gravy wasn’t a disaster, we never talked politics and — most importantly — our house is still standing.

The ups-and-downs nature of hosting a holiday reminded me of one of my favorite types of columns: #Wins and #Fails. Because what’s a holiday without major victories and colossal mistakes?

So today The Bargain Advocate brings you #Wins and #Fails: Thanksgiving Weekend edition. Read on and feel free to laugh, sneer, criticize or burst into tears. The holidays are an emotional time, after all.

Frugal #win: Avoiding impulse buys and crowds while purchasing a turkey. I don’t have to tell you that turkey is a great deal at this time of year. Yes, it’s a lot of meat, but at 70 cents per pound, as long as you have freezer space, you really can’t beat it. I’ll be the first to admit we didn’t get the cheapest turkey on the market because we bought a fresh one and there were limited options on — wait for it — Kroger ClickList.

Because if there’s one thing that makes the Bargain Advocate kind of stressed, it’s shopping in large crowds. The aggressive shopping carts (“Outta my way, aisle hog!”), long lines with melting-down children, short tempers, endless temptations for impulsive purchases (“A holiday isn’t a holiday without 16 different kinds of cheese!”)...sorry, guys. If I can sit on a couch in my PJs five days before Thanksgiving and fill out my list online to pick up on Turkey Day Eve, you’d better believe I’m going to do it.

So I’m counting it as a #win. So there.

Frugal #win: Potlucks. I feel like the people in my Better Homes & Gardens magazine hide, behind their perfect smiles, a burden to make an entire meal for their entire smiling family in their Better Homes all by themselves, but I would much rather accept contributions from other family members.

In the end, we had more food than we knew what to do with, and all we did was make a turkey, gravy and pumpkin pie. And cut up some veggies. Magic.

Frugal #fail: The carcass. If I were a tried-and-true frugalista, I would save the turkey carcass to make stock or soup or other-some-such thing, yes? So when the turkey had been served and the picked-over bones sat, lonely, on the cutting board while the cat licked his chops, it came time to make an important decision: What to do with it?

Obviously, I said, it needed to be saved. But we had nowhere to put it. There was no room in the fridge; anywhere else, the cat would get it; put it outside to cool and the stray cats and who-knows-who-else would get it.

We decided to bag it and stick it in the (detached) garage until it was cool, then retrieve it later.

The problem was that we forgot to retrieve it until after we’d passed around the coffee and the pumpkin pie several hours later, and the temperature that day was warm enough that the Bargain Advocate’s paranoia about food-borne illness would not allow her to even attempt to use the carcass.

So away it went, and all possibilities of soup, stock or other creative uses with it.

There’s always next year.

Frugal #win: Leftovers. Sure, we didn’t have the carcass, but thanks to our family’s culinary generosity and our hefty turkey, we had plenty for sandwiches the next day, and a repeat Thanksgiving dinner the next night, and sandwiches the day after that, and...you get the picture.

Frugal #undecided: Watching an unofficial broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We’re not paying for cable, so that’s good. But, as is the case with Pop-Tarts and Cheerios, it’s hard to duplicate the real thing, and the emcees of the version we were streaming were so annoying that even Middle Roy was irritated.

Plus I never got to hear how many lasagnas it would take to fill up Parade Float Garfield, etc.

All told, it was a great Thanksgiving, and I’m looking forward to enjoying creative turkey leftovers all winter long.

Bring it on, Christmas, hippo tunes and all. The Bargain Advocate is ready.

If you have insight about a frugal living topic or an idea for a future column, email me at amroy@nncogannett.com. I’d love to hear from you!

Happy saving,

Abbey