“Just when I thought I had all the answers,” Grumps said, “they changed the questions.”

That’s how I felt this Thanksgiving. Just when we thought we’d figured out a game plan to put all the players on the field— you know the team: stepkids, kids just taking steps, ex-husbands, inlaws, ex-wives, outlaws, grandkids, babies who survive on gnocchi and Cheerios, kids who don’t cook, kids who won’t cook, kids who’d rather sleep than cook, kids who become vegans but never turn down a pepperoni pizza, friends of all flavors, the alcohol-dependent, sex-crazed, amoral and otherwise fascinating holiday gnomes, misanthropes and trolls—they changed the rules to the game.

It’s a whole new dance. I was doing the cha-cha but turns out they’re calling new signals and running the reverse. And they’ve spun me right off the gridiron onto the porch.

Someone turn on the light, please. And give me a chair. I’m sitting out this samba.

Back in the days when I had braces on my teeth with remnants of Black Jack gum and maybe a jawbreaker or two, holidays were pretty straightforward. Mom made the turkey while Dad set up the bar. Not unlike every other great American family.

And, oh yes, he paid meticulous attention to his carving station. For slicing the bird fit into his slide-ruling, Rube Goldberging, Swedish engineering profile. He had a system for dissecting this bird just like those logarithms he learned at Michigan Tech. So he applied the formulas to the big bird with precision and pace. Mess with his system and he’ll check you into the penalty box.

And by the way, he really spent most of the day staring with love and lust at the baking bird basking in our linoleum-lined kitchen.

Like a Panzer in Rommel’s army, my mother, General Jean, dispatched me to the table. Crisp linens, silver, crystal and china were lined up in exact order, lest a visitor might proclaim that his errant salad fork had been rendered unusable or a salad inedible due to a poor placement by the teen whose hormones were raging like the waters of the Mississippi after a spring thaw.

I was good at this. Setting the table, that is. Not the hormones. For Thanksgiving break, in addition to setting la table magnifique and washing dishes and polishing silver, I didn’t worry about a thing except Miss McClintock’s Thanksgiving vacation essay, which had to be 500 words on something clever like what Thanksgiving meant to me. How do I stretch “I Love Stuffing and Sleep” into 500 words?

Fast forward to le crisis du jour, away from the pie into my Thousand Oaks hamlet of holiday horrors. Life takes turns in ways that we never predict, right? Honestly, this past year, I felt like a race car driver charging the Le Mans course, catapulting through the Alps, spinning around curves, expecting a magnificent view of the Mediterranean at the finish line with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly tooling next to me in a little Alfa Romeo.

Instead, I’m encountering bucketloads of perilous and unpredictable zig-zagging jive turns, one after another. And I am stuck in Bulgaria out of gas.

You, too? Not that I don’t love Bulgaria. Bottom line, this crazy race makes me feel for these kids . . . and for us. The whole fam damily. Yeh, he’s Grumps and I’m Yaya, and together we’re just a couple of old poops who love our kids and our grandkids and everyone remotely related within a thousand-mile radius.

But for holidays, it’s such madness and they have to go here. And they have to go there. And it’s breakfast with the so-and-so’s, then lunch with the blobbityblahs, then dinner with the dippity-doos, then dessert with the dastardly-dahs, followed by latkes and loconuts with the Yosemite-Sams. Sounds lovely doesn’t it? Muy loco.

It’s not that I don’t love the Sams or the Doos, don’t ya know? Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. . . . Sign me up. I can sing this song. So . . . .

Maybe for Christmas, I’ll just rent the Civic Arts Plaza. Join me for the first annual Stupor Bowl. You bring the yams and the face masks. I’ll drag along my stupendous Savory Green Beans à la Yaya and maybe . . . maybe I’ll even set the table. We’ll invite everyone we know within that thousand-mile radius. It’ll just be a love-o-rama of holiday bliss. It’ll be the Boston Celtics with the Lakers, the Trojans and the Bruins, the Hatfields and the McCoys in a fest of fuzziness.

Kickoff at high noon. You can hold, but no cheap shots allowed. Hail Mary passes reserved for those in the spiritual arts. Praise the Lord but pass the champagne. Cheers!

You can reach Elizabeth Kirby at kirby@theacorn.com.