Ok, I know it’s happened to some f you. Funny/disturbing things that have gone wrong during thanksgiving to make the day - or part of the day - completely shot or unbearable. Case in Point.
You are a guy going to your new girlfriends house for Thanksgiving Dinner. You arrive to find your GF’s father - whom you have never met - was the clerk at the pharmacy who just sold you condoms the day before…*
Personally, last year I went to cut our 25 pound turkey. It was on a cutting surface I thought was quite solid…I was wrong. The whole beast fell off the cutting table and skid half was across the tile floor. Sufficed to say, we didn’t eat any of the bottom.
Anyone else have seriously funny or seriously bad things happen on turkey day?
** This situation was emailed to me…I think it was a Readers Digest, Terriible things on Turkey Day vignette
Your oven goes on the fritz. You discover it when, four hours after putting the turkey in, you wonder why you don’t smell roasting bird. I got it fixed, somehow, but Mrs. R still took the turkey over to Mom’s to cook. Dinner was delayed that year…
Your wife cuts off the tip of her finger while slicing ham. Spent that Thanksgiving in the emergency room…
Power failure. Fortunately, after the meal; we sat around and played Spoons by candlelight. Actually had a pretty good time.
My poor mom. We had a houseful of people and the LIGHTBULB IN THE OVEN EXPLODED ALL OVER THE FOOD (shortly before we were supposed to eat). I was pretty young…I don’t recall what she did to rectify THAT trauma.
About four years ago, we were on the way to dinner at my uncle’s new girlfriend’s house. As my sister was getting in the car, my dad started to pull away, and runs over her foot. When she starts crying hysterically, he tells her to stop crying. An argument ensues, Dad turns around the car and heads back home. He gets out of the car and sets out for a walk in the neighborhood. My mother and I stay in the car. My sister goes into the house (I don’t think her foot was even bruised, she was just shaken.) That has to be the most dysfunctional holiday on record.
We went to Shoney’s that year.
Anytime since then that my sister has gone to get in the car on a holiday, we all make sure her feet are in the car before Dad pulls off.
About three years ago, while having our usual blissful holiday dinner, Grandma turns to me and says “Honey, are you a lesbian?”
Only my mother and one of my cousins heard it, and both nearly choked. Grandma must have seen the shocked look on my face and, rather than leaving well enough alone, decided to continue. “Your second cousin just came out of the closet, and I wanted you to know that if you are, I’ll support you.”
All I could do was shake my head and respond “No, Gram, I’m not, but if you’re looking, I know a couple that dig older women.”
Hmm… I think the Thanksgiving that my wife and I announced that we were getting married was it. We were very nervous, lots of family around, so when I finally got people together in the same room and made the announcement I was hoping for some relief or congratulations. Instead there was …just silence. It seemed to last forever. Then some uncomfortable congratulations. And lots of “Are you sure you’re ready?” sorts of questions. Made my wife feel REEAL welcome, I can tell you.
My favorite was when I was a kid. My mom was not big on buying us sweets, so when she bought the marshmallows for the sweet potato casserole one year when I was about 8 or so, she hid them in the spare oven so my sister and I wouldn’t sneak and eat them all. Then she told everyone not to touch the oven.
Well, Mom is a little on the absent-minded side sometimes, and Thanksgiving morning she turned on the oven to preheat it for the turkey. The resultant smell of fused plastic bag and caramelized sugar was unforgettable…I don’t think she ever managed to scrape it all off the oven rack.
The worst thing that ever happened was having our car break down on the way to my grandparents’ house. It was pouring rain that day. Fortunately we had just entered the town they lived in and we were only a mile or so from their house. My dad got to a pay phone (this was 1983, no cell phones then) and called my grandpa to get us. We were also fortunate enough to have a family friend who was a mechanic and didn’t mind coming out later that day with his wrecker to tow the car back to his shop.
I got in a huge fight with my dad when I was 8 months pregnant on Thanksgiving. Me and my bf had driven over an hour to get to my parent’s house and we only stayed for 15 min. We ended up eating at the Old Country Buffet. The worst part was not having any leftovers.
The absolutly worst thing that ever happened to me on Thanksgiving was guests who showed up 6 hours late…five guests out of a total seven diners…and they couldn’t stay to eat.
No phone call…nothing.
The reason they were late (and not hungry) did not involve murder, mayhem, death, unconsciousness, family crisis, lack of phone, broken car or an Act of God.
I revised my guest list after that. We had leftovers for a very very long time.
This time of year is always tough for my girlfriend. When she 8, she was coming home with her family. She was in the car with her parents and her sister was in the following car with their grandparents. Their car slid onto on the train tracks as it was snowy and icy, her dad got her out of the car and was trying to get her mom out when the train hit. Her mom died on the scene and her dad died in the hospital on Christmas eve. :(
During the holidays I try really hard to make it as nice for her as possible, with as little driving as I can.
Holy cow, MikeG, I will never complain about having a crummy holiday again! (Even if this Friday will mark 7 years since I shattered my tibia and fibula and spent weeks in the hospital having metal stuff installed to put them back together.) I think the only thing that could suck worse would be living through a civil war or something.
I prepared Thanksgiving dinner for my wife and mother in law a few years ago. My brother in law shows up as dinnertime approaches, which is OK, but he always just shows up - nobody knows for sure what he’s going to do. I’m at the point where everything is coming together and I’m in the home stretch. Then my wife’s feisty (a heart attack and colon cancer/surgery has slowed her down only slightly) aunt shows up and before she even takes her coat off starts giving my brother in law shit for not keeping in touch with his family. So now he’s pissed and giving shit back. They’re both standing nose to nose bickering at each other. This is now the centerpiece of our Thanksgiving setting. So I announce “Can someone help me with the potatos?” My wife chimed in and the situation defused. It was ridiculous but my wife and I get a little chuckle out of it from time to time.
Let’s see…there was the one years ago, when I was a teen, when my drunken older brother leaned across my mother and told my dad that the “best pussy I ever had was doggy style”.
Not only was the ensuing melee entertaining, the comment was educational and informative for me.
While this topic would be considered highly-inappropriate dinner conversation in many families (not in mine, I’m sad to say) I say we give Grandma here props for open-mindedness and good-heartedness, and just disregard her timing. Just as one of my friends was considering coming out to his family, his granny asked him if he was gay. He said, “Why on EARTH do you ask that?” Granny replied, “Honey, I love you and it’s part of my job to protect you. There are people in this family who might hurt you with the things they say because they don’t know any better. I do not want you to get hurt, so I need a little education so I can help educate THEM.”
On topic - the worst thing that ever happened on Thanksgiving was the year that I relayed my husband’s suggestion to have a Christmas grab bag to his aunts. I did the whole, “we would rather spend the bulk of our money on Christmas for the kids, and just draw names for the adults” explanation. You would have thought I suggested necrophilia on the dining table. I was called every dirty name in the book by the two 70-something aunts, who decided “my” grab bag suggestion was proof that I didn’t want to buy them presents anymore. It’s been three years now, and the aunts and I have returned to civility when we absolutely HAVE to be in the same zip code at the same time, but from then on we have had Thanksgiving here, with my side of the family. (I want to be fair here, too: the WryGuy defended me, and stood by me when I said no more holiday visits to the aunts.)
Then there was the Thanksgiving in some truly substandard military housing. The bird had been in the oven for a couple of hours. I got up to do the periodic basting, only to find myself walking through about a half-inch of water…in the living room!
A quick check of the downstairs bath revealed the toilet merrily boiling over. I attempted to plunge it, which made matters worse. So I called my duty guy over at the Public Works (where, I might add, I was the head mofo in charge) and told him to call the duty civil service plumber in to fix the problem.
The guy was of course not willing to leave his holiday dinner to come unplug a toilet and I had to get rather unpleasant about the whole thing.
So he shows up and is pissed about being there until he sees the flood. His professionalism kicks in and he hauls a snake out of the truck and runs it down the pipe, retrieving…a pair of child’s underwear. There was little pleasant conversation at the table that year.
Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago… two years ago, on Thanksgiving…
Do you live in the Pacific Northwest, Rocketeer?. You should have given me a call, cause our dinner was still in the oven and the power stayed off for hours.
…she lives in the church nearby the
restaurant, in the bell tower with her husband Ray and Facha, the dog…
Then there was the Thanksgiving where all the siding blew off the back of our brand new house.
…had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat,
went to sleep, and didn’t get up until the next morning, when …
Not to mention the year when the overpriced free range organic turkey started to smell, well, not at all like a turkey should smell, after being in the oven for about 20 minutes.
*So we took the garbage, put it in the back of a red VW
microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, and headed
on toward the city dump. *
Oh, and my brother totalled his car trying to get to our house one year (he was unhurt) and my father ran over a deer leaving our house another year (the deer wasn’t so lucky). Wonder what’ll happen this year?
sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar. *
