That sounds absolutely vile…I can’t wait to make it for Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving at my house is always a mess. My parents invite people from both sides of the family. My mom’s side is almost all in AA. My dad’s side of the family all should be. Hilarity does not ensue.
Do you know how you are supposed to let the turkey “rest” after cooking? And do you know that cats love turkey?
The first time that I had a home of my own and I cooked a turkey, I put it on the top of the stove to cool down, had friends over, happy times…until Fred jumped on the counter and burnt his kitty lips while trying to get a bite of hot turkey.
We heard him scream, laughed and then cut his bite mark out and tossed it away. Ate the rest.
It wasn’t until the next day that I realized that Fred had actually hurt himself because his mouth was all swollen. Anyone want to know how that vet visit went?
Good grief! I’ve heard plenty of giving-birth-in-the-car stories, but never one where the woman was also driving! Did they even get her inside, or were you born in the parking lot?
My family’s Thanksgivings are pretty tame. This’ll be the first without my grandfather, he passed away in July. He was 92 and very, very ready to go, but he’ll be missed anyway. He was pretty far gone mentally - fortunately the happy part of his personality won out, and everything was WONDERFUL all the time. Especially food. It was DELICIOUS, always. He also developed a bad habit of snatching food off the serving dishes with his fingers. There’s going to be a hole at the table this year. I think his role could be filled perfectly by a big, overly friendly labrador retriever, but somehow the rest of my family isn’t on board with that.
Well, since being married, we’ve done a variety of “traditions”: inviting the to-be in-laws, pot luck with friends, invited to friends’, dinner at restaurant that has Thanksgiving buffet.
My favorite pre-marriage tradition: I used to live across a highway from a strip club in Arlington, VA. The owner set up a quite-affordable Thanksgiving buffet, and turn on every TV (10 of them) to every possible football game being played that day. And then at 6PM, out came the usual entertainers. 
I was inside on a gurney, and I believe they got her into a room.
She had similar experiences with my brothers; one was born in the bathroom, after they didn’t believe her when she told them ‘This isn’t gonna take long’, and the other was born in the hallway, on a gurney, literally squirting out with the doctor barely catching him. I saw the movie Big Fish and swear that part of the movie was about him. 
Ahem, I believe the verb you’re looking for is “appropriate”, we Seabees never “steal”!
My story is from 5 years ago. We had raised our first small flock of heritage-breed turkeys and I saved the biggest one for our feast, the first time we were hosting the entire extended family and some friends.
The turkey was so big I had to cook it on the grill, but it worked out beautifully! Great looking crispy skin, perfectly cooked in every way.
Luckily for me I decided to carve the bird in the kitchen and serve it “buffet-style” on a giant platter, because when I began carving I found that in my inexperience in butchering turkeys, I had left the crop in place. A giant sac full of turkey feed, corn, and for some reason, straw. (Why would the turkey eat straw? I have no idea). I tasted a slice of breast meat from nearby and it didn’t seem to have affected the flavor, so I sliced out the crop and whisked it into the garbage before anyone else noticed.
I can’t remember a Thanksgiving with my inlaws where my MIL didn’t forget about the yams and set fire to the marshmallows.
Wife says its tradition. 
Our first Thanksgiving as newlyweds, we were living an 8-10 hour drive from the nearest family - and on the wrong side of the DC/Baltimore area (so driving there would have SUCKED). So we decided to host for friends at our little apartment.
While we were doing kitchen stuff in the early afternoon, we heard a couple of shouts from the folks across the hall. Later on, they dropped by for wine and told us what had happened: one of the burners on their electric stove had basically exploded, sending sparks. No fire ensured, fortunately, but when they got over their shock, they saw a chunk missing from the ceramic coil.
Later that day, we were boiling a pot of potatoes, when
BANG
sparksparksparksparksparksparksparksparksparksparksparksparksparksparkspark
I remember jumping and shrieking - then I lifted the pot and sure enough, a chunk was missing from the coil. Yes, the exact same thing happened to us that had happened to the neighbors a couple hours earlier. There were bits of potato burned onto the inside bottom of the pot, presumably the part directly above the burner’s failure point.
Thanksgiving 1983.
I was working overseas at the time and was in Sydney, Australia. One of the Aussie ladies I worked with decided she was going to do a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for all the Americans. She did a great job; it was like being back home.
The nicest part was that she and I started flirting with each other and as everyone was leaving, she asked me to stay for dessert.
So, uh, how was the stuffing?
(Come on, someone had to ask…)
I had my tonsils out the say before Thanksgiving, I didn’t have sick leave yet at my new job so I had them out for the 4 day weekend.
It sucks to have all that good food in front of you and it’s too painful to eat.
“requisition”
My silly story - mrAru, being Navy at the time, would always bring home a couple guys for the various holidays so they wouldn’t be stuck in barracks [single guys or geographic bachelors] so one crisp Thanksgiving morning Gil’s truck rolls up with another guy inside with him. In they come, NewGuy with a six pack of a decent beer, Gil with some assorted chips and dip. Bright and cheerful, mrAru annpunces ‘Great, Let’s get the turkey ready!’ and off they go, outside. They corral the turkey after a brief chase and off goes the head. Upside down by the feets they hang the poor not so little bird [44 pounds. Sucker was over a year and a half old. they get big] to drain the blood, and let the 85 gallon overpack drum finish heating the water to get ready to scald and pluck. There was absolutely no way that we would have been able to use the usual 5 gallon pot to scald with!
So, NewGuy - looking rather green around the gills decides to hole up in the house and do KP with me on the rest of the side dishes, so I plunk him in front of a football game to peel apples, potatoes, sweet potatoes and snap beans …
Gil had mentioned ‘fresh turkey’ [as in not previously frozen] but he didn’t mention how fresh the bird was going to be! NewGuy was a city kid, to him all meat came in little plastic trays from the freezer or meat departments!
I will add that Giblet [why yes, we do name the animals. My very tasty sheep were named Opal and Lambchop.] was so large we had to remove the shelves from the sliders and balance the one used on bricks set in the bottom of the oven, and mrAru had to make a roasting pan because we didn’t have one large enough. Giblet filled the oven almost to touching the sides and the elements. Very tasty - one of our better thanksgiving birds!
The turkey in my story above was named “Smarty Jones”.
We’ve also had pigs over the years named Breakfast, Lunch, Maple, Apple, Hickory, Loin, Shoulder, Ham, and Belly.
My inlaws had a 40-ish pound turkey one year as well, fresh-butchered, and too big to fit in the oven normally. We ended up taking out all of the shelves and putting a muffin pan in the bottom of the oven to support the pan and keep from crushing the electric heating element.
An inlaw changes her eating habits wildly and without notice; one cookout she asked me if my vegetarian sausages were also gluten-free and soy-free. Obviously not. She ate chicken sausage instead. :smack: I’m making a gluten-free cake for a relative with celiac disease, and I plan to use a recipe that’s also vegan and soy-free. With my luck, the “refined” (brown) sugar will cause it to be snubbed by the fly-by-night “dieter.”
If you live long enough, you’ll have lots of Thanksgiving stories.
Way back in 1950 (I was 5), we were expecting a large number of people. My mother had a ginormous turkey that barely fit in the oven, and she had been in the kitchen all week, preparing all the “trimmings.” But Mother Nature stepped in and, beginning the night before, a huge blizzard took place. by morning it was still snowing, and one by one the guests called to cancel. By the time it stopped snowing everything had many feet of snow, and I remember looking out the second-floor windows, and it looked like I was on the first floor. At first everyone was trapped in their homes, but gradually over the weekend, people dug themselves (and their neighbors) out. The street was plowed many times, and by the time it was cleared there were huge mountains of snow on either side. So all the kids were sliding down into the street (there was virtually no traffic). But the thing I remember most: We had this huge Thanksgiving dinner all to ourselves. I swear that’s all we ate for a month. And all our would-be guests were at home, starving.
Another year, my brother and I had been fighting over who’d get the turkey’s tail. But as soon as it was served, some woman grabbed the tail for herself. I don’t even know who she was, but my brother and I were pissed . . . especially since the bitch never ate it.
Another Thanksgiving, My aunt was in the hospital giving birth, while her other kids were having Thanksgiving dinner with us.
Another Thanksgiving, I was volunteering at a suicide/crisis intervention hotline with two other counselors, and as usual, all the married people were home, celebrating with their families, while we singles were filling in. We had just started to bitch about missing dinner, when a caterer showed up with a ginormous holiday dinner for us, and eventually a local soup kitchen. We never found out who sent it.
Quick tip: if you use oven bags for turkey roasting (which I highly recommend. No, the skin doesn’t get picture-pretty, but the meat is wonderful), do not also cover your roasting pan. One year, I nearly served turkey sashimi as a result of this mistake.
Mom always made homemade pies fro T-Day, taking particular pride in her made-from-scratch pie crusts. She scaled her pie crust recipe to make either 5 or 20 crusts. She felt 5 was too few so it was always about 15-18 pies by the time she used a second crust to top a few apple pies. The minor problem from my point of view… I HATE pie.
I went to college quite far from home and one year stayed on campus. A friend invited me to a nice T-Day dinner with his family and his dad kept pointing out their traditions. After dinner we settled into the living room as dad explained they always watched a tape (VHS) of It’s a Wonderful Life to start the Christmas season. Dad then spent the next five minutes fighting with the cellophane wrapping of the never-before-watched tape.
Another year and T-Day at a different friend’s home the cooking was going well. My friend started to pull the turkey from the oven and the flimsy aluminum roasting pan started to buckle. Hot drippings spilled from the pan and an instant grease fire erupted. I doused the flames with the closet thing that would work - a jar of salt. It put out the fire and ruined the turkey.
Years later I traveled to Colombia over the T-Day holiday and it was the big meet-the-soon-to-be-inlaws trip. I planned to cook a full American Thanksgiving spread… and then the reality of poverty and the effects that has on a Colombian kitchen ended that plan. No one in the entire neighborhood owned an oven. La novia’s familia cooked for a family of 12 on a two burner cooktop but I could not figure out a way to cook a turkey given what was available.
Less than 2 months after getting married we were invited to my parent’s house for Thanksgiving. My mother told my wife that she planned to have dinner at 2:00 in the afternoon. We lived in New York then, about 3 hours away. At 11:00AM Mighty Joe Young was playing on the TV and I intended to watch it. My wife began to get nervous since I hadn’t bothered to shower or get dressed yet. The movie final ended and it started snowing outside. It was already 1:00 and I got dressed and ready to go, but then insisted on eating something before we hit the road. She was going crazy. I told her to relax there wouldn’t be a problem but she was freaking out about being late and driving in the snow. We drove down to Philadelphia without problem, the snow wasn’t that bad, arriving around 5:00. My wife was tearing her hair out worried to death about showing up late with the dinner already over. This was the dark ages and there were no cell phones so she had no way to tell my mother we would be late and I refused to stop and find a pay phone on the way. I was also messing with her. When we arrived my mother said “Oh hi, your’e here. Dinner will be ready soon”. I knew this would happen. My mother couldn’t get an ordinary meal out on the table on time much less a Thanksgiving dinner. My wife’s mother and sister had been invited also and showed up at 2:00, and they were starving. We finally ate around 7:00 that eveniing.
In cases like this, I’d probably be inclined to lie. I’d never try it with someone I either didn’t know or someone who truly had food allergies or other issues, but randomly picky eaters make me crazy. One of my sisters is like that. She asked me once if I put onions in a certain dish. I lied. She ate it. She liked it. She suffered no ill effects. But if told her about it today, over 30 years later, she’d retroactively start to puke. :rolleyes:
I have no patience with food drama.
Back on topic, a gazillion years ago when I was a kid and my grandmother was still having turkey at her house, part of the entertainment was my grandfather, his two brothers, and his two sons, along with my dad, drinking and bragging about all sorts of stuff. One uncle claimed credit for something to do with the manufacture of horse shoes - it might have been true, but it seemed really random to me. I also recall that the more they drank, the louder they got.
And how could I forget this gem: about 3 years ago, my youngest sister was offering everyone at the table $5 if they’d drink the pitcher of gravy. I’m thinking alcohol was involved in that also. No one took her up on her offer, but every year, she tries again.