I started this thread because it seems like everyone else had a perfect & flawless Thanksgiving. C’mon… all the guests have gone. They can’t see you typing. Fess Up: tell us about your Horror Show (with bread stuffing shoved up its rear)
I’ll start. Yes, I like salsa & chips before a meal and I often make my own. Its extra nice when a hostess thinks about me enough to put out a bowl of chips & a jar of salsa. Except, perhaps, when the jar has been stored in a basement that is not clean & has bugs.
Hey, wanna guess what you get when you open a jar of salsa stored that way?
Introducing a new (ie fake) word to your lexicon:
Roachsplosion!!!
:eek::eek::eek:
Its like a snake can o bugs, spreading out across the table in all 360 degrees. It couldn’t have been more horrific if it had been bought from a lottery store called Hamunaptra-Mart.
Don’t know the details but an apparent spat between my sister and her husband (my bil) caused bil to do all the cooking. Nobody was to bring anything. Not One Thing.
What bil put on the table was absolutely the worst meal you could possibly imagine. The gravy was the consistency of yogurt, the turkey was cooked in a microwave convection oven that does not brown… the very little bit of meat I put on my plate was pretty raw so I nuked it. Needless to say he would have been the first one to get chopped.
Not this year, years ago, and its the after not so much the event itself. My fathers side of the family was/is big in numbers. Every year it was big get together at either this big house or that big rural farm. After many years of this my father decided he wanted it at his place, which was a medium to small typical 3 bedroom house. At the time it was just Dad and I living the bachelor dream there. We spent quite alot of time cleaning, moving stuff out of the way to make enough room and gathering extra chairs and stuff so everybody would fit. Then, we got pretty heavy in the food prep as well.
I remember telling Dad something to the effect of “hey, this is lot’s of work but at least we will have enough leftovers to coast for the next month”. Every damn bit of spare food (and as usual there was tons of it) was hauled away. We had to cook dinner the very next day
No a food disaster but some tiny family drama that has managed to pollute the entire weekend.
We had dinner early, like 1PM because my husband’s cousin had to work later. After dinner was finished and everything was cleaned up and we had gone on a nice long walk to walk off some of the calories, my husband and I retired to the basement to work on our music project.
I have to add here that we live with my mother in law. We moved in with her and my father in law in Dec. of 2009 to help take care of them. She’s 90. My father in law just passed away in May so this is the first holiday without him and he was truly the heart of the family.
So, my husband and I are in the basement, basically improvising, not playing a specific tune, just improvising (I won’t get into too much detail about the project) but we’ve got the recorder going because we don’t want to forget what we did if we have any idea that we like.
My mother in law comes down the stairs and I shut off the recorder. We stop. She asks what we’re doing and we tell her that we’re improvising and recording and that she’s welcome to stay and listen but that she needs to be quiet because we’re recording. We begin again and she starts singing along. (remember that we’re improvising so there’s no discernible melody, I’m singing but not words, I’m basically scatting and playing around). We stop. My husband asks her again not to sing and says that we’re recording and that her singing is very distracting. She gets very offended, proclaims that we’re lucky that she allows us to play music in her house at all (remember we moved here to take care of her and she would not be able to survive on her own without our assistance) and stomps off upstairs.
Later, we turn on a movie and I invite her down to watch it with us. She declines and she’s been sulking ever since.
Oh, and there was another fight while we were putting up Christmas decorations on Saturday. This one involved the cat. Which basically ended up this way. Fuck you! Fuck you you bastard! (yes, she called her own son a bastard which is hilarious if you ask me)
Mind you this was all between my husband and his mother. I try to stay out of it because if I get in the middle of it it’s always a bad idea.
The food was good at mine. Only minor irritants were a mismatch of expectations as to arrival time, and being strongly-pestered to take home leftovers that I did not want because I had no place to store them.
I called home to talk to what I hoped would be my whole family. The only one I talked to was my father. It gets harder and harder to talk to him every year. He gets more rambly. I’m worried that he might be on his way to alzheimer’s.
My response to the roachsplosion - “OH DEAR GOD! AAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!1111!”
velvetjones, I have some commiseration for you and your husband. My mom is a lovely, kind, thoughtful woman who is almost 70, and when she comes to visit, I can stand her for about two days before she starts driving me out of my tree. I don’t know if we’ll be taking her in when she gets older or not, but I can see scenes just like yours happening regularly if we do.
I’m still trying to process my Thanksgiving. Mine had some elements of velvetjones’s.
I flew from NYC to Montana, bringing my SO of 6 years to meet the extended family for the first time.
My mom and step-dad recently moved in with my grandparents. My grandparents are 86 and 88 respectively and have a seemingly endless list of health problems. The major ones: My grandmother’s kidneys are failing and she’s blind, my grandfather had a stroke last year and a broken hip this September. My grandmother’s personality has recently changed dramatically, leaving her self-absorbed, delusional and aggressive. My mother does nothing all day and night but cater to them and is more emotionally wrecked than I’ve ever seen her. She breaks down in tears once a day from the stress. My grandparents constantly remind my mother that they “didn’t ask her to live with them” and that they should be “charging her rent.”
On Thanksgiving, my grandmother threw a tantrum because we had planned a quick pop-in at my stepfather’s parent’s house. Both my grandmother and grandfather refused to eat any of the dinner my mom prepared. My SO was left at the table alone, picking at his food awkwardly, as I tried to comfort my mother in her bedroom.
The one good thing about the visit is that my SO watched the family drama and was as kind and patient as could be. He listened to me vent and didn’t say a single bad word about my family. He must really like me.
We had a small celebration, nuclear family only. My husband worked Thursday, so the big meal was set for Friday. He also had plans to go visit an old friend over the weekend, and I didn’t know until the last minute whether he would drive upstate Friday evening or Saturday morning, so I planned for a 2pm meal.
At 2pm, he and the Boy were still out running errands (they left to make a bank deposit and pick up some tea bags at 11 am.) When they got back at 2:30, I still needed to brew the tea. By then, the turkey was cold, of course. Additionally, Tony thought that would be a great moment to bitch about my housekeeping. (I’m not Suzy Homemaker under the best of circumstances. For the past month, I’ve been dealing with severe anemia, and I’m utterly exhausted just trying to manage the basics. I know things have gone undone lately, and had really worked at creating a great Thanksgiving - cleaned and mopped the dining room and kitchen and vacuumed and dusted and cleaned the living room while the guys were out. Cooked a huge meal from scratch. White tablecloth and crystal and silver on the table. I was really trying to do better, dammit!)
Anyway, the beautiful but lukewarm meal was finally served a little after 3. I couldn’t do more than pick at a few bites, telling the kids that I must’ve filled up sampling while I cooked. Left the table once to cry a little and splash my face to hide the evidence. Norman Rockwell didn’t paint our portrait.
My mother passed away on Tuesday and I spent Thanksgiving day driving 7.5 hours in the car with my father (he and my mom were divorced), aunt, and uncle as we drove from Massachusetts (where my mom lived) to our homes in Pennsylvania in ridiculous traffic while my uncle tried to go as close to 90 mph as he could. We got home around 6:30 and the streets in our town were empty as everyone else was feasting with their family. My dad and I (we live together) went home and watched Animal Planet until we fell asleep on the couch. Worst Thanksgiving Ever.
(We had our feast on Saturday, and it went pretty well.)
Had the Turkey Dinner on wednesday and it wasn’t bad. Saw the Macy’s Parade in person on thursday and it wasn’t great, but I didn’t expect it to be.
But Friday. Black Friday. Family wanted to shop. In New York City. The corners of the streets were literally jam-packed with people, and when the light changed both sides rush at each other like it’s a charge in a medieval battle. To say nothing of Macy’s itself (although the other stores were actually less crowded than the streets were.)
How the hell did the roaches get IN the jar? Was it open? Because if it had been opened and closed properly, it should have been in the fridge, not in the basement.
This year’s was very nice, but there is the legendary Thanksgiving of 1978 that is still talked about in my family.
My Grandmother (Mom’s side) lived across the street from her brother/SIL, and both families always combined for a Thanksgiving that involved from 60-80 people. It was always great fun and my favorite holiday. That year was no exception. Everyone had lunch and then hung around a few hours to help with cleanup, etc.
We left to go to Dad’s family for an evening meal and my little sister got sick in the car. Then Dad. Then Mom. Then baby sis. By the time we got home somebody was puking in both bathrooms, Dad at the kitchen sink and Mom hanging over a trash can. I was the only one not sick and didn’t know what to do, so called my Aunt (Dad’s sis). She came, loaded them up and took them to the ER and me to Grandma’s.
By Friday morning there were 42 members of my Mom’s extended family in various hospitals in the area.
No one could figure out which food was the culprit until my 76 yo great Aunt got up Saturday morning and fixed herself HAM & eggs. She was hospitalized for 8 days.
My mom later asked why I didn’t eat the ham since it was usually one of my favorites. Well, it was shiny and weird colored, like mother of pearl. I thought it looked funny.
It is only the last six or seven years that Mom’s family has started having ham at Thanksgiving again. But you can be sure that sucker is cooked and cooked some more.
Right after dinner this year, my dad lost two units of blood through his penis and stroked out on the toilet.
Turns out the “stroke” was really a vasovagal response to the bleeding, and the bleeding is a complication of the elective prostate surgery he had about a month ago. His urologist is up in there right now cauterizing the sucker (hopefully). I’m typing this from the surgery waiting area.
So, yeah. This Thanksgiving will go down in history as The First Time In My Adult Life That I Saw My Dad’s Wiener.
It wasn’t really a horror, but my Thanksgiving dinner was a ham and cheese sandwich by myself in my dorm room. I’m in a Study Abroad program and I don’t really have any friends here. Luckily I’m going home soon.
