The Thanksgiving Dinner

One of the first Thanksgivings I spent with the husband's family was the one the mother-in-law hosted in the duplex she had been renting (before she moved in with us... ah, those were the days...).
It wasn't exactly a large apartment, but it had many rooms. So, card tables and TV trays were set up hither and yon for eating on. And the food was laid out on bookshelves and desks and anywhere else there was a flat surface.

It was an odd buffet, to say the least.

Anyway...

One flat surface held relish trays and other small finger foods as well as a dish of pretty pink mints.
The bowl of mints was an odd thing to see with the veggies and such. I'd have thought it would have been on the dessert flat surface, but a lot of things were odd and there wasn't a lot of room for everything to make sense, so, okay, whatever.
As we waited for dinner, I witnessed a couple nieces sneak several of the mints, giggle in the corner, and come back to snitch some more. And okay, I was hungry waiting for dinner to start, so I winked at the nieces and had one or two mints myself. They were sweet and yummy, in a Pepto-Bismol kind of way.

Fast forward through dinner...

Two pale-faced, wide-eyed nieces came up to me.
"Do you know what those mints were?"
"Um, were they... mints?"
"NO! They were digestion pills!"
"What?"
"They were pills for digesting food! We ate a whole bunch of them!"

What the...

Who the he!! puts PILLS out on a buffet table?

WHAT?!?

Right there were kids can help themselves to them?

"Are we gonna be okay?" the nieces wanted to know.

I didn't know.
So we asked the mother-in-law.

"Oh," she explained with a wave of her hand, "Those were just for anyone who needed them. They won't hurt anything."

Crimeny.
Why not make your brownies with Ex-Lax while you're at it?

Am I crazy, or is this weird?