Thanksgiving Dinner

At 14, Jamie Ridgely has five years of experience raising money for charity, and she knows fall is her busiest season."I have done this since I was 9, and I enjoy it so much, it is just routine," said Jamie, whose home in Manchester is filling with canned goods. "For Christmas, I collect toys; for Thanksgiving, I collect food."She also is running a raffle to fill any gaps in what she has not received. Weekends find the North Carroll High School freshman at area shopping centers, asking for donations and selling chances on a Millennium Barbie or Furby -- both expected to be hot items this season.

It's not exactly politically correct to say so, but Thanksgiving dinner can be a real drag.OK, the food is almost always great: tables filled to overflowing with heaping platters of comfort food, desserts galore and the obligatory pass-out on the couch afterward.But preparing such an enormous feast can be a daunting, back-breaking task for the family's designated holiday chef, who will surely wonder: "Wouldn't it be great if we could just eat out this Thanksgiving?"This year, choices abound for Thanksgiving dinner at local restaurants.

It is going to be an unusual Thanksgiving night in Television Land.Usually, assuming lower viewership on the holiday, the networks air films during prime time that have already been seen in theatrical release. Last Thanksgiving, CBS aired "Grumpy Old Men," while NBC showed "Home Alone" and ABC offered "Scrooge."But, this year, for the first time since 1995, Thanksgiving falls during a November "sweeps" ratings period when audience measurements are used to set future advertising rates. And, so, one of the networks, NBC, is trying something different in hopes of capturing a big audience: It's offering Thanksgiving-themed episodes of its hit Thursday night series, as well as bringing two of its strongest other series, "Will & Grace" and "Just Shoot Me," over from their regular nights.

Chill out this Thanksgiving. After all, dinner is in the freezer. Or most of it, anyway.With a little planning, we found the holiday meal doesn't have to be a marathon of chopping, stirring and cooking before the hordes arrive. This year, we managed to tuck into our freezer ahead of time a cheese-ball appetizer, stock for the gravy, the dressing, a zucchini casserole, a sweet-potato dish, green beans, pumpkin-molasses muffins, ginger-honey butter, cranberry relish and a pumpkin tart.In a dress rehearsal, all we had to do was thaw out most of the dishes in the refrigerator overnight and pop them in the oven after the cooked turkey was removed.

"ALL I WANT to do," says Larry Griffin, "is help all these people who've fallen through the cracks." Toward that end, Larry and his We Care and Friends group will serve about 4,000 meals Nov. 22 at their ninth Thanksgiving Dinner for the Needy. The monster feed will take place from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Cook-Pinkney American Legion post at 1707 Forest Drive in Annapolis.Larry is good at this sort of caring thing because he, too, fell through the cracks once. He was a drug addict for the better part of two decades and got so low that he lived for months in an abandoned cargo container.

SO THIS YEAR, YOU agreed to be the host of the big family Thanksgiving dinner. Congratulations! You moron! No, seriously, being host of Thanksgiving dinner does not have to be traumatic. The key is planning. For example, every year my family spends Thanksgiving at the home of a friend named Arlene Reidy, who prepares dinner for a huge number of people. I can't give an exact figure, because my eyeballs become fogged with gravy. But I'm pretty sure that Arlene is feeding several branches of the armed forces.

SITTING DOWN to Thanksgiving dinner with ...Martha Stewart: "Welcome! Before we partake of this wonderful meal, I'd like to ... please don't touch that. That's a Venetian print tablecloth with Victorian-style gold-thread trim. If you could just keep your hands above the table, like so."Anyway, I'd like to ... you there, did you move that wine glass? The wine glass is supposed to be here. Move it back, please. Yes, right now."First, good news! The 'Martha Stewart Living' TV program is now on five days a week.

Pete Stroup and Kay Klovestad spent Wednesday morning cooking together, poring over a sauerkraut recipe handed down through their family.But the mother-and-daughter team was not getting a head start on their Thanksgiving dinner. Yesterday, they carried the huge stainless steel pot filled with shredded cabbage carefully seasoned with bacon, brown sugar and kielbasa to the Salvation Army Glen Burnie Center where they shared it with dozens of hungry men and women."It's hard for me to give just a little bit," said Stroup, one of a group from Pasadena United Methodist Church that serves lunch monthly.

Over the river and through the woods to the Union Hotel we go. The river is the Susquehanna, and there are miles of interstate before you get to the woods. Still, at the end of your journey is a place so steeped in history I can't imagine a more appropriate setting for Thanksgiving dinner. (As of this writing, the Union Hotel will have as the special on Thanksgiving Day a turkey dinner, or you can order from the regular menu.)The Union Hotel, built in the late 18th century, isn't a hotel but a restaurant.

TOWSON -- After eight years on the county planning board, Chairman Philip W. Worrall is leaving next month, along with at least three other members of the 15-member volunteer body.Also leaving are Wayne Skinner of the Loch Raven area, Douglas A. Strouse of Cockeysville and Cabrina Dembow of Dundalk. The terms of Laura Brecht of Phoenix and Ellwood Sinsky of Owings Mills also expire next month. Their status is uncertain.Skinner's replacement is Arthur N. Rogers III. Dembow's replacement is Richard W. McJilton.

An electrical fire destroyed the women's shelter at the Bea Gaddy Family Center late Tuesday, a setback for a charity that is scrambling to fulfill its tradition of feeding Thanksgiving dinner to thousands of needy people. Though fire damaged the homeless shelter at 424 Duncan St., the adjacent family center at 425 N. Chester St. will continue to collect turkeys and canned good donations. "The shelter is gone as we know it," said executive director Cynthia Brooks, who grew emotional yesterday as she described the damage and the increased need.

Last November if you had asked me to recommend a restaurant for Thanksgiving dinner a week before the big day, I would have said, "Good luck with that." But with the economy in the tank, I don't think you'll have trouble finding a place this year. Your best bet might be to go to Open Table (opentable.com). Make your way to the Baltimore/Maryland page and click on the link to Thanksgiving 2008. Fill in the time you want and number of guests, and you'll get a list of available restaurants.

Flush with two vans of food and $1,200 raised at a benefit concert Friday, Baltimore's Bea Gaddy Family Center is ready for its annual Thanksgiving dinner, organizers said. Michael Austin, a jazz musician who spent 27 years behind bars for a city murder conviction that was overturned in early 2002, said he used to watch Bea Gaddy on television in prison and was moved by her generosity. This year, he put together a benefit concert and said he plans to do another one next fall. "It was the first time that I've ever experienced something so great that I had something to do with," Austin said.

Today we continue our three-week series to get you ready for a no-fuss Thanksgiving feast. In the 1970 black comedy Diary of a Mad Housewife, Tina Balser's obnoxious young daughters rebel at the Thanksgiving dinner table because she has altered the stuffing recipe. "This stuffing tastes different. Why didn't you make the old kind of stuffing we love?" Silvie whines. While talk of politics, religion or old family feuds can spoil Thanksgiving dinner, nothing will ruin it faster than changing the stuffing recipe.

To Michael Austin, she was the angel who appeared on his prison television each Thanksgiving, heaping mashed potatoes and turkey onto the plates of the thousands of homeless and needy people who had come to her for a hot meal. Bea Gaddy, perhaps Baltimore's best-known ambassador to the poor, died in October 2001, less than three months before Austin was freed from his Jessup prison cell and returned to his home city. He had served 27 years of a life sentence before a judge reversed his murder conviction, saying there was no evidence he had committed the crime.

Overlea man gets life in slaying, arson A 34-year-old Overlea man was sentenced yesterday to life in prison without parole for strangling and stabbing to death his upstairs neighbor, whose body was found in the bathtub of her burning apartment. Ellis Lee Hickman Jr. received a consecutive 30-year sentence for setting the apartment fire. Many of the friends and relatives of Rakiyya States wept as Baltimore County Circuit Judge Lawrence R. Daniels imposed the sentence. The judge characterized the killing of the 29-year-old woman as "as brutal as it was vicious."

So one day Americans are thanking the Big Kahuna in the sky for all those blessings and for things like love and family, and then the next we're trying to run each other over with our shopping carts. Isn't there something askew about this picture? The Rodrigues-Smith sisters think so. Monica, 23, is a senior mass communications major at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro. Her younger sister Amanda, 20, attends school in the same neck of the woods.

Propped up on her aunt's lap, 1--year-old Kayla Boblett was in heaven when she dipped her tiny fingers into a pool of mashed potatoes, retrieved a sufficient glob and stuck it into her mouth. She then used her fork to spear a chuck of gravy-soaked turkey. She was in her own world and wasn't paying attention to the hundreds of people around her eating, serving up meals and giving thanks yesterday at the annual Bea Gaddy Thanksgiving dinner at the Patterson Park Recreation Center. "Mashed potatoes, that's her favorite," said her aunt Donna White of Dundalk.

The following mother-son phone conversation occurred earlier this year. Subject: Thanksgiving. "Hi, dear. I thought this would be you." (Mother in Florida claims to predict calls from son in Maryland. Spooky accuracy.) "How's it going?" he asked, meaning it. "Oh, good. Just waiting for the man to come about the roof." (Mother often waiting for men to come and fix things.) "I wanted to let you know we're thinking of going to New York for Thanksgiving." For the past four years, Thanksgiving dinner has inexplicably been held at son's house in Maryland.

Thousands of Marylanders headed out by train, plane or automobile yesterday with relative ease in the annual rush to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with loved ones. Despite an early-morning accident in which a gasoline tanker truck exploded on Interstate 95 near the Capital Beltway, forecasts of a record number of vehicles on area roads and the possibility of snow last night, many travelers were pleasantly surprised by the ease of their trips. At Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, the screens announcing arrivals and departures late yesterday afternooon displayed good news: on time, arrived, landing.