funny Thanksgiving or other holiday disaster stories

[tigereye]

this is the time of year when I fondly remember holiday disasters that are now somewhat amusing.

To wit, one year my mom's oven failed with the turkey only half cooked. So we ran over to my neighbor's apt. ( she was in a nursing facility, we had the key because the house was for sale) and cooked it there. Oddly, my mom's oven was always dying at a critical holiday moment...or there would be some holiday plumbing disaster.

Another time we ended up eating a wild turkey my brother had shot(because the other turkey was still frozen) that still had some bird shot in it... that was pretty funny. Wild turkeys do not taste very good....

I am cooking this year again, but so far there has not been a disaster, amusing or otherwise. (knock wood) :)

[mykpart]

1. A friend's first Thanksgiving that she cooked herself,

she bought a frozen turkey the day before Thanksgiving, put it in the oven about 11:00 am Thursday morning. They waited all day for the turkey to cook. Finally, about 11:00 that night she took the bird from the oven. When she started to carve it, there was the paper bag of giblets still inside, along with instructions on how to cook a turkey!

My other funny story is one year when I worked in a hospital emergency room, a lady came in with a broken foot. She had dropped a frozen turkey on it! (Guess it wasn't that funny for her!)

[seaglass]

2. My mom started the stove on fire one Christmas. It was an

electric stove and she covered the entire top with tin foil so she could have a larger heating surface.

She had to finish cooking the turkey on the hibachi in the garage.

I remember it most because my grandfather had given me a tape recorder for Christmas and we pretended I was the reporter and I interviewed him about the fire.:-) I think I was about 10 years old. What I wouldn't do for that tape!

[Blue Diadem]

3. I had one of those ovens too

Our first oven was that way and it was a day of celebration when I finally was able to get a new one. For some reason, the longer it took to bake something, ie: turkey, it would burn something out and hubby would have to fix it. That's why I keep an electric roaster on hand..paranoia from those days.

Two of my funniest Thanksgiving moments took place years ago. Our first house..first Thanksgiving there. I turned on the kitchen faucet and something blew apart. Water was spraying everywhere and hubby went to turn the water off and there was no separate water shutoff. So that meant all the water to the house had to be turned off.

The 2nd event took place when I was a kid. My Mom had been in the hospital with the Hong Kong flu so my teenaged brother and I were making Thanksgiving dinner. We were trying to get the bird ready and had it sitting on the kitchen table. My brother picked it up and it slipped and began sliding and seemed to fly right off the table..I swear it looked like it spread it's wings. I'll never forget the thud and our laughter.

[tigereye]

4. that sounds like Thanksgiving at our house

minus the dropped turkey. Those stories are what make things amusing years later. :)

[LaurenG]

5. When my folks bought

their first microwave my dad told my mom he'd cook the turkey. He cooked it alright. It was "micro burned" and it smelled really bad. He tried to tell us it would be fine to eat and tried to get the dog to take a piece. The dog wouldn't touch it. We had a fine vegetarian meal that year.

[NMDemDist2]

6. my mom and I worked graveyard shift at the same place and her MIL

was coming for Xmas (step dad's mom)

we didn't do any decorating so we had to STEAL a Christmas tree at 6AM Xmas morning in our nurses uniforms

Last year for Thanksgiving I ordered one of those grocery store "already cooked full dinners" you were just supposed to be able to re-heat and eat. I got it home and the 14 pound bird was frozen solid at 11AM Thanksgiving morning. I will say the lovely folks at our local Democratically owned grocery store sent a guy to my house with another bird within the hour :bounce:

[tigereye]

10. that's a very funny image - nurses sneaking off with a tree!

the frozen solid bird and the desperate attempts to thaw it seem pretty common, too. ;)

[NMDemDist2]

29. it wasn't us sneaking off, it was us trying to climb the fence in mini

skirts that was the hoot :evilgrin:

[GardeningGal]

7. I liked to watch my Mom get the bird ready

One year after she had pulled the package of giblets out, I was very intrigued looking at the turkey's innards. I was especially interested in the heart. I of course wanted to share it with my older sister who was still sleeping. I went in and woke her up and told her she had to see the turkey heart. She thought I meant one of those little heart candies you see at Valentine's day and held her hand out. She screamed like crazy when I gave her the heart and woke everyone else up too.

[Fleshdancer]

8. My Grandmother use to sabotage at least one dish

My Grandma was not a nice person...and usually drunk. One year she lowered the temp of the over by at least 100 degrees while the turkey was cooking but she didn't tell anyone. That was a late Thanksgiving dinner.

Another year she was making the pumpkin pie but she didn't trim the edges of the pie crust for some crazy reason and so when she took it out of the oven, there were long black strips of crust hanging off the edges.

My mom has a bad back and one year she threw her back out which devastated her because she LOVES cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Grandma was horrible to her that year and actually complained that mom was faking it to get out of cooking and to get attention. :eyes:

Other times she would do small annoying things like buy grapes with seeds in them but she wouldn't take the seeds out when she cut the grapes for the Waldorf salad. I hated this because my mom would make me cut the grapes instead. Or she would get pissed over ridiculous things like the one year when we bought mayo in a squeeze container instead of a glass jar. She was convinced that it tasted different without actually tasting it.

The burping and smacking at the dinner table was gross too. That woman was a complete disaster.

[mykpart]

23. Gloria, we must be cousins!

Sounds like we had the same grandmother!

[hobo_baggins]

9. My dad had bought me a new pet while he was out travelling in china town..

I accidentally got it wet, and fed his buddies after midnight, next thing I knew, everyone in my town was being attacked by gremlins...it was the damnedest thing.

[tigereye]

11. uh-huh

next you'll be telling us that you got a new airgun for X-mas, or that your life flashed before your eyes when you lost all the money at the bank... ;)

[Left Is Write]

12. What about the time...

you got locked in the attic while everyone else was out shopping, and you had to put on some very old ladies' clothing to keep warm, and then you discovered the old family home movies?

[hobo_baggins]

14. There was the time I overslept and woke up to find my family gone...

and then some robbers tried to break in the house, but i thwarted them with a series of cleverly placed boobie-traps.

[qnr]

21. oooo - he said "boobie" (in keeping with the kiddie movie theme) :) n/t

[MiniMandaRuth]

13. Oy.

Both involve my poor mother.

Five years ago, I was in the bathroom. All of a sudden, my mom is SCREAMING for me. So, I wander out to help her.

She's holding up our Christmas tree, bracing herself and trying to set it back up against the wall. I try to help, by we both loose our balance after trying to set the tree back up.

CRASH! SHATTER! BANG!!

So, three hours later, we're mourning our ornaments (A few survived, but most of our antique ones bit it.) while walking through the Bon Marche. We bought some new ornaments and now they're very pretty.

The second one is painfully funny.

Our german shepherd had died the day after Thanksgiving. She was a very beautiful dog, an all black shepherd. When we opened our ornament box, sitting on top was a GS ornament.

Mom decided it would be a respectful motion to put it on the top of the tree. I went into the other room to finish watching LOTR: TTT. I'm right in the middle of Helms Deep when I hear a huge BANG!

Mom is screaming and Dad's running around. I run out to the living room and there's mom, next to my piano bench, laying on the floor, cradling her elbow.

So, she broke her elbow (And my bench, which has not been fixed yet). Two weeks and one titanium pin later, we're all a happy family.

I'm not even going to get started on school parties.

[tigereye]

15. oh my

your poor mom!

My dad used fishing line to tie up the tree, so we never had one fall over. But some friends of mine had their beautiful tree fall over and lost a lot of antique ornaments.

That may be why my tree mostly has wood and metal ornaments.


One silly story about trees, my gm used to complain to my grandfather about the tree not being straight... year after year. So one year he apparently got very aggravated, got a hammer and nails and nailed it to the floor! Gm had very nice wood floors, too. Gotta love those hot tempered Irish families. ;)

[ScreamingMeemie]

16. One year, the turkey caught on fire in the oven...My mom called

the fire dept and three hooks and ladders, an EMS and the fire chief...not to mention two cop cars all showed up at our house. :hi:

[tigereye]

18. slow night, eh (that's a good one!)

how are ya Mrs. G? What's new? Cooking anything good this Thanksgiving?

I volunteered to cook again this year for the family, since my mom is so tired of it. I am actually kind of psyched.... to make pumpkin cheesecake and my apple/french bread chestnut stuffing!

:hi: and Happy Holidays to you and your family!

[Wetzelbill]

17. this may have been before I was born but one time

my parent's got together with my dad's side of the family for Thanksgiving. My grandmother, my mother and all of my Aunts are tremendous cooks, they just did the whole thing up really big, I guess. A huge meal for gosh,had to be over twenty people I would say. So as they were all sitting down ready to eat one of my older cousins, got sick and power puked over everything on the table, haha. I had to be either really little or not even born because I don't remember this at all. I guess he literally hit everything and ruined the whole meal. So they all had to go out and eat dinner at a restaurant. :)

[tigereye]

19. oh no

I know I shouldn't be laughing, but I am....

:rofl:

that is too funny, but also kind of gross....

[Wetzelbill]

20. oh yes very gross

I imagine it wasn't too funny at the time, lol. Now it's absolutely hilarious. :)

[mike_c]

22. funny weird strange and kinda disturbing Thanksgiving story....

About 25 years ago I was married and had a new baby. My wife and I were invited to Thanksgiving dinner at my parent's house, along with my younger brothers and their spouses and girlfriends. This was in northern Virginia, in the Washington DC suburbs. Cable television was just becoming available-- you needed a cable box on top of the TV to receive it-- and cable service was pretty eclectic and cool. Different cable providers vied with one another by trying to provide more stuff. In any event, it was really new, and it was access to the extra stuff, e.g. uncut movies and the like, that made cable TV cool.

My whole family (other than me) is very religious-- fundies, actually-- so that makes this story even stranger.

So after Thanksgiving dinner we settled in to watch football on the new cable service, and sometime during the afternoon the conversation turned to cable TV, and why it was better than broadcast TV. My folks and brothers were very proud of their new cable access. My brothers-- who also lived in the DC suburbs and had cable TV-- I lived in rural West Virginia where even broadcast signals were tough to come by-- my brothers argued that cable was great because of the diversity of available channels-- there was even a porn channel. I was like "No way!" but they said "Yep," and to prove it, they switched during halftime to a porn movie. So there I was, with my new wife and kid, my brothers, and my parents, watching 40 minutes or so of a sweaty, groaning porn flick after Thanksgiving dinner, with my mom bringing in snacks and everyone thinking that this just HAD to be the wave of the future. It still gives me the creeps, 25 years later!

[tigereye]

26. oh

:rofl:

that is so funny, kind of like when people would watch the sound pattern in the 50s when TV first became available to everyone.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

24. Great topic!

Other than the Thanksgiving our kitchen sink was hopelessly clogged when my son pouredfunky spaghetti sauce down the drain, we've been pretty fortunate. ~furiously knocking on wood~

We just moved the feast to my mom's house that year. SOOOOooo glad we didn't have shot in the turkey! :hi:

[tigereye]

27. my brother hunts

I think the wild turkey was all we had when the oven failed, I don't remember exactly. It was amusing, picking little pellets out of it. But then I am easily amused!

Hope you guys have a great holiday. :hi:

[DanCa]

25. Lets see oh yah my dads boozing.

We got a call from our neighbors in 93 about my dads drinking. Apparently he got so drunk the night before he went to the wrong house. The neighbors called us at six am to come and get him.
Now this was the funny part some how he made his way to thier bathroom and while he was going he lost balance and fell backward. When we went to pick him up his feet were sticking out of the tub and he was still asleep..It was like watching a cartoon. Hey it got him to quit drinking so I can laugh at it now.

[tigereye]

28. yeah in my family it was the inebriated philosphical

discussions that happened at 3 am ( this was when most of us were grown.) I usually went to bed.

or the inebriated 3 am all night post-Midnight mass poker game. I always won, since I was usually sober! ;)

[MarsThe Cat]

30. Thanksgiving 2000 will never be forgotten...

with the selection still not settled, i told my wife that it would NOT be a good idea for me to go to thanksgiving dinner at her sister's, as her repuke mother would indubitably say something that might cause me to explode.
promises were made, and NO political talk was to be allowed.

but monster-in-law and wine and such promises do not mix well.

before i knew what was happening, the words "...partisan fucking bitch" had already come out, my wife, who had made a quick trip to the kitchen for a clean fork, came back to find me getting the coats, and telling her that we were leaving.
to this day, that was the last meal i had with the in-laws(although, technically, i didn't really have that meal, either).

[underpants]

32. Mmm have to ask

Was it the WAY you said "partisan fucking bitch" or something?

[underpants]

31. Dearly beloved BUHHREEEEEEPPPPP We are gathered here BUHRREEEEE

Okay not really a holiday story but my brother got married a few years ago (didn't last long) between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

They got married in my parents front room and that morning the sewer line got stopped...clogged completely. It didn't smell but as everyone was arriving to the low key affair there was a Roto-Rooter truck in the drive way.

My now wife and then mother (har har) had to go to my aunts' hotel room to get ready (no shower). I had taken the last shower that was available.

We had forgotten about him in the bathroom as we were all getting ready for the event. Suddenly just as the ceremony started he fired up the snake. I excused myself and asked him if he could hold off for a minute or two....he didn't care he was getting paid by the hour.

The county had to come out an fix the line a few days later.

[tigereye]

33. that seems to be the nature of sewers

seems my dad was often in the basement with the snake during a few holidays as well.

:hi: UP Oh, it will be the little one's first X-mas soon, right?

Cool.