CONTEST: Who here will have the crappiest Thanksgiving, in 300 words or less?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

First prize is a “Poor, Poor Baby” and a pat on the head! :smiley:

I’ll start, though if someone can’t top this I will be shocked.

Starts at 1pm at my Mother-in-Law’s house. More than 75% chance her and my father-in-law will have a fight while preparing the Bird.

Dinner served to us, them, and my brother in law and sister in law with 4 loud kids, ages 2-8. Nothing but cacophony in a acoustically challenged wood floor house burning my eardrums. My 8 year old niece has bad table manners, so my BIL will spend the entire dinner yelling at her. She won’t listen.

My MIL, with each wine, will get on her high horse and start complaining about her friends and other people. She will also make some comment about football being on. If it’s really, really bad day she will complain about how she threw this big turkey dinner (again) and how no one helped her (yet, she hosts Thanksgiving every year).

Then, we all pile into a car, and head over to my FILs sisters house, where it is loud, crowded, and we wont be offered any food or drinks. When me and my wife try to escape after an hour, they will all act incredulous and beg us to stay for more torture.

The night ends when I call my 77 year old mother, who was invited to have dinner here but declines every year (she lives over an hour away), and she reveals that she turned down multiple invitations from other relatives (who live . . . 15 minutes away?) and ended sitting at home by herself on Thanksgiving because she has some made up illness, making me feel like shit, again, for abandoning my mother on Thanksgiving.

OK, that might be more than 300 words, but top THAT! :smiley:

2

I spent last Thanksgiving in a mess hall in Iraq looking forward to this years holiday in my house with my wife. This year no wife, no house.

28 words. Happy Thanksgiving.

3

Ouch, Loach. Sorry to hear about that.

St. Anger, I think next year you and your wife should driver over to your mom’s and have lunch with her. A pox on those other people! :stuck_out_tongue:

4

I think Loach is the front runner . . . :smiley:

5

I’m currently at work in the middle east. And no fancy feast.

6

Paul whats wrong with having no cat food?

7

It’s 3:00 a.m. and I’m wide awake because of steadily increasing pain after an out-patient procedure I had on Monday. It’s too soon to take the next ibuprofen and, in any event, the pain should be decreasing not increasing. I woke up in a sweat but I don’t know if I have a fever because I don’t have a thermometer and can’t get one until the morning. So, I will likely end up in the ER tomorrow because I’m now visiting Canada and won’t be able to see my own doctor. Did I mention tomorrow is also my birthday?

8

It’s 4:30 Thanksgiving day here in China.

Woke up feeling a little sick. Taught a class. Sat around for office hours. Ate an egg and some crackers and vegged out in front of the computer for a while. I’ll probably take a nap, clean up my house a bit, eat oily Chinese food from the dining hall, go for a jog and then maybe get some street food.

Nothing too horrific- just the sniffles and the tail end of a badly broken heart. But it’s cold and lonely out here. This is my fourth Thanksgiving sitting alone at home in a distant country, away from the warmth of people who love me.

9

This will be the first Thanksgiving where I am in my own house and not going to family, mostly because the GF only gets the day off and we live about 20 hours away from any family.

We’ve invited a few trapped friends over too, nothing fancy.

Good lord… I’ve already been yelled at all week, and got kicked out of the kitchen tonight for trying to bake the pies for her. Tomorrow should be fun, as she attempts to bake her first turkey. :wink:

Personally, I just racked a batch of Irish Red into a keg to carbonate, and should be good for drinking in the morning, so I’m gonna man the couch, watch movies, and enjoy home brews all day. Let’s hope drama does not find me on the couch.

10

I thought this was supposed to be the crappiest Thanksgiving contest? I think you have a pretty good day planned.

I just finished a full day of work. Well not really, I’ve been at work all day but the normal 80 emails in my inbox were not there because unofficially my company has decided on an email free Thanksgiving for the benefit of the US based employees. So, I’ve probably only put in about 8 hours of real work instead of the normal 10. And now I will enjoy my walk home in the nice autumn weather to go play with my 3 bambinas and have the “standard” dinner of about 6 really nice Chinese dishes. Probably there will be some sort of poultry, by accident and not design, but definately not a turkey. My thanksgiving will be over in about 4 hours when we all go to bed. Poor me. :smiley:

11

I’ll just be by myself. I’ll cook a small turkey, a few trimmings, and an apple pie. The leftovers last about a week.

12

I’m in England and my family is in America, for the second Thanksgiving in a row. And this wouldn’t be so bad, as this year I have a kitchen and was going to make myself a small approximation of a Thanksgiving dinner. However, I’m in the middle of applying for another visa and yesterday when I went to the university’s immigration advice office to have the application and supporting documents checked, during the drop in time, no one was there. They just up and canceled an hour beforehand for no reason. So now I have to go back up there again today because this really can’t wait until next week, and the drop in time is in the middle of the afternoon, and none of my housemates will be home so I can’t ask them to watch whatever I would have been making. So, no Thanksgiving dinner for me.

13

Amen, sister! Actually, today was a beautiful warm day here in Japan, and I don’t have a cold at the moment, but I’m down with the bruised heart and the loneliness. And by coincidence, it’s my fourth Thanksgiving away from the States too. I will be going back for Christmas, though, so I don’t feel too bad–I certainly don’t think I’m in the running for the crappiest day. It was just lots of Japanese study and a little bit of English teaching, and some homesickness, since this yeear, I’m in Tokyo and my social circle is much diminished. My friends and I used to have an unofficial approximation of Thanksgiving every year (sometimes two, to include the Canadians) but this year all my friends are busy and most of them don’t even have kitchens, so no cheerful potluck with friends for me. It’s just me and my bitterness here tonight. :smiley:

14

You’re with people who love you right now, Sven–they’re just not in the same room with you.

Me, I was planning to be alone (my emotionally-unavailable quasi-GF is with her parents and siblings, having literally laughed at my suggestion that I might like to join them at some future family gathering, “Ha. I’d do that only with someone I really felt close to. Wait, were you serious? Sorry about the laughter”) and reasonably miserable, but then I had a suicidal friend, whose girlfriend died this year and who has become a non-stop weeper and wailer on that single subject for the past few months, sound so distraught that I invited him over to share a meal (he was literally making suicidal noises–“Life is an asshole and I’m shit, and we will soon part ways”). So bummed out me is going to hang out with my bummed out friend, over leftovers and whatever i can find to defrost.

Beat THAT with a stick.

15

People here have actual sad stories. I thought my Turkey Day would be crappy because it would have been my first alone. Like, all alone. Not me and the old man in the middle of nowhere alone. Then my friend invited me to eat with her family, which can potentially be awkward enough, and then made things better with the forewarning that they are “white trashy.” So, my Thanksgiving might turn out to be at least, err, interesting.

16

OK.

So, I’m jobless, broke, have no family and no local friends.

I am fixing a small Thanksgiving dinner for me and the critters. I will likely not hear another human voice except for the radio today.

I am so lonely I ache. I feel like I could cry at any moment. I want to crawl back in bed and stay there.

Worst. Thanksgiving. Ever.

17

The longing to celebrate Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends has been embedded within my heart for years. Our family never celebrated it because of ‘religious’ mandates. I married into the religion, but my heart was divided. I left the religion and lost my life’s social system.

Today I am one foot in and one foot out. My husband and parents do not celebrate holidays. The rest of my family who might are too estranged and dysfunctional to find. My new friends comfort their souls with sentiments of “I hope you can join our Thanksgiving someday.”

Dry turkey, disconnected family, inconsiderate in-laws. I wouldn’t mind. I just want to sit around a table for once with a thanksgiving spread. Perhaps I will fill my heart by visiting Cracker Barrel later today and celebrating quietly in my heart for what I’ve longed for a lifetime.

I am still thankful and grateful for what I do have. Life, love, … the gift of compassion. Nobody should have to feel this sort of isolated pain on this day of Thanksgiving. I just want to experience a real Thanksgiving for once in my lifetime. Just once.

To ease my discomfort, I think about finding a local soup kitchen to volunteer in today to fill the souls of those less fortunate. Less fortunate how? We all have our inner turmoils, conflict, and heartaches. A day like this brings it to the surface more than others… except for Christmas. At least for me.

LH

18

I really do encourage you (and PapSett as well) to look into volunteering for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. Being with other people and feeling like you’re doing something nice for someone is much better for the soul than a holiday spent alone.

Sometimes our family of origin can’t be what we want it to be and we have to form new bonds to have the family we want to have. I had a good relationship with my parents but they have both died, so this holiday season (the first one without Mom) I have had to focus on making a new start with my boyfriend and brother as my family. While it would be ideal to have everyone I loved still around, I really can’t complain about what I have now. One of my mottos in life has always been “It can always get worse”. :wink:

19

If this were 9 years ago, I’m fully confident that I would win the contest hands down. Thanksgiving of 2000 was so traumatic that I still usually have some kind of nervous breakdown around this time every year.

But today is going to be a good day. No family, just a couple international students with nowhere else to go, me, my husband, and my first turkey dinner. Little by little I have worked to replace the bad memories with positive experiences, and it gets easier every year.

Those of you having a lousy Thanksgiving, try to remember that. It feels like forever right now, but one day your misery will be just a memory of something bad that happened to you a long time ago.

20

Strongly seconded. Helping others is praiseworthy no matter what, but realizing the even greater misfortunes of others, and doing your part - however small - to lessen those misfortunes, can give you a sense of perspective and an emotional reward that is simply invaluable.

Warmest best wishes for Thanksgiving to my fellow Dopers, and especially to all those posting here. You are not alone.