Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I love the idea of gathering together with family and friends and recognizing all the many things we have to be grateful for. I also love to cook, so this year my husband and I decided we would be legit grownups and have our families over to our house for the big day. Were we naive to think that a love of food and an army of kitchen-related wedding gifts were all we needed to host a fine feast? Perhaps. But, miraculously, we pulled it off. Nothing was charred, no one got food poisoning, a good time was had by all.

There are things one learns when one prepares one's first Thanksgiving feast. Since the Hairy Alien loves lists, we shall post these lessons in numeric form, below.

1. No matter how many preparations you do in advance so that the day of feasting can be "relaxed and enjoyable for everyone", you will still be scrambling frantically around your kitchen during the last hour before dinner is served.
   
2. It takes a lot longer for things to cook in an oven whose two racks are both completely crammed with baking dishes. There will be more scrambling frantically around the kitchen.
   
3. Since you'll have spent at least one full day cooking, you will not be hungry for dinner once it's ready. You will eat it anyway. Your stomach will hurt late into the night.
   
4. You can never have too many bottles of wine on the table. Intoxicating your guests is a useful distractive tactic to employ, should the food not turn out satisfactorily. And if the food is fine, hey, you've just got a lot of wine on the table.
   
5. No matter how gourmet or delicious a cranberry-sauce recipe you may come up with, there will still be people for whom it's simply not Thanksgiving without slices of that ribbed, gelatinous cylinder that is the Can O' Cran.
   
6. Not only does food really taste better when eaten off of fancy china, but it also looks a lot better. A super-size pile of high-carb American holiday fare--topped with a fresh slice of Can O' Cran, of course--looks downright sophisticated when served atop a handpainted antique dinner plate.
   
7. Some of your guests may insist on doing all the dish-washing and putting-away. According to Arin Louise's Guide to Etiquette Befitting a Lady, it is completely acceptable to allow them to do so--just as long as you take a moment, in the spirit of the holiday, to be thankful for their generous efforts.
   
8. Vegetarian Thanksgiving dishes are much harder to reincarnate as leftovers than the ol' bird. Mashed-potato-and-green-bean sandwich, anyone?
   
9. You owe it to that days-old squash to introduce it to Tony Chachere's World Famous Original Creole Seasoning. You'll be glad you did.
   
10. Hosting Thanksgiving is like childbirth (from what I hear, anyway): At the time it's painful and exhausting and you can't wait to be able to just go to sleep. Then, later, you forget about the agony and can't wait to do it all again.