Normally, I spend Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncle’s house. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they decided to go elsewhere, leaving me to make Thanksgiving dinner by myself for my mother (who spent the day working), my (other) uncle and my uncle’s daughter.

I helped my grandma make Thanksgiving dinners as a child. Simple things. Sometimes she would let me stir the stuffing, or roll out the dough for the apple pie. Helping her cook was one of the foundations of my childhood. Still, I didn’t think I’d be expected to make a Thanksgiving dinner by myself until I was a real adult. Maybe not even then.

I relish challenges though, and prepared myself for the day.

Step one: Oversleep. By a lot.

I set my alarm and my mom called to wake me up. Still, I managed to close my eyes for “five more minutes” and wake up at noon. One hour before the turkey needed to be in the electric roaster.

Sure, this is plenty of time for normal people, but I wake up blind as a bat and as irritable as a mountain cat. I need to get ready and shove some plastic bits in my eyes before I become a functioning human.

When that was done, I had forty-five minutes to get that bird to roasting.

Step two: Prepare the stuffing.

First, I made a lovely bed for my turkey out of celery. This is something my grandma does for some reason. I should ask her.

Then I moved on to the stuffing.

An obstacle: My mother bought two bags of stuffing (TWO), one pre-seasoned, one not, and both large enough to stuff my turkey. What to do? Am I supposed to mix them? To what end? To dilute the seasoning? To add some of my own?

So, I texted my mom. Then I called her. She didn’t answer. I decided that I would use the unseasoned bag. I am an independent person who likes to season her own things, and, hey, maybe she wanted the seasoned bread for croutons. In a dramatic turn of events straight from a film, she called me back just as I was about to pour the stuffing into the water-butter mixture. She wanted me to use the pre-seasoned and pad with a bit of the unseasoned. Okay, Mom. So much for the seasoning revolution.

Step three: Stuff the turkey.

I made the stuffing, and then it's time to get out the bird. This part is easily the most difficult for me. I hate touching raw poultry. Luckily, my mother has taken the neck and the giblets out of the cavity already. I just need to stuff some soggy bread in there and get it roasting.

It's in a fragile, covered aluminum tin, so I have to carefully lift it out of the bottom of the refrigerator and onto my stove. I take the foil off of the top and look at it. It is grotesque. I rarely feel quite as barbaric about eating meat as I do when looking at a whole (or, well, almost whole) carcass of a creature.

I don’t want to touch it. Is it too late to get a tofurky? No one would know the difference. (Ha.)

I think of the wine in my fridge. Should I get buzzed for this activity? Will that properly deaden my morality, as well as the crawly feeling of germ-related anxiety creeping over my skin? Possibly, but then I might drop the turkey and never be able to go in my kitchen again. Decisions.

I decide to forgo the wine, opting instead to gird my loins and shove large handfuls of stuffing into the turkey’s cavity while completely sober. I am quick and thorough, and my turkey is soon ready to be lifted into the countertop roasting oven. I push the tin against the oven in the hopes that I will not drip bird juice on the counter. I lift the turkey over in one smooth motion.

Of course, I get bird juice all over the counter and must clean up after I throw away the tin and sterilize my hands several times. I comfort myself with the fact that millions of people have touched raw turkey over the years, and only a small (known) percentage of them have died from salmonella.

Step four: Sage and butter the turkey.

My mother bought me two little containers of sage. Am I supposed to use all of it? Maybe. Surely, it’s not a requirement? I take the seal off of one of the little containers and begin dusting my turkey. It is covered in only a few shakes. I like sage, though. It smells like Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades with Grandpa and Mom and dinner with the whole family. Maybe extra sage isn’t a bad thing.

I sage-dust the turkey until it looks decorative.

Then, it's time to put the butter on and set it to roast. I take a whole stick of real butter and set it on top. Afterwards, I cross the kitchen, grab the top to the electric roaster, and try to fit it over the turkey.

Mayday, mayday! The stick of butter has made the turkey too tall for the lid!

What to do? Should I turn on the oven and hope that as the butter melts the top settles down onto the roaster? Should I take out the celery? Should I drink all of the wine in my fridge and call Grandma?

No. There is a simple solution to all of this.

I cut the butter into long, thin slices and set them over the top of the turkey. This means I have to wash my hands again, but the lid fits (!), and I can turn the roaster on to 350 degrees and let the turkey cook.

It’s only an hour late.

Results: My stuffing was atrocious (somehow), but everything else was pretty good. My turkey looked beautiful (and decorative). We made a metric f-ton of too much food, though, and I ended my Thanksgiving leftovers weekend with probably five new pounds on my waist, and still a quarter of everything left in the fridge.