I hope your dad made it up to all of you! It’s bad enough when assholes act like assholes, but it’s extra-painful when the people who love you stand by and let them.

that must have been horrible and i feel kind of bad laughing at that last line. on a related note, my family all got food poisoning from a hotel breakfast buffet, on the day we were all heading out post-christmas. it hit my aunt and grandmother in middle-of-nowhere oklahoma. they eventually had to find an ER for my…

First, my father’s family, all good Polish working class Catholics, always felt he married down by marrying a girl (my mother) from an Irish Catholic working class family. Thus my mother, brother, and I were always viewed as “not quite family”, whose presence was to be tolerated only because they loved my dad. Who…

My simpleminded brother-in-law, who is Dunning Kruger made manifest in the kitchen and insists on cooking the main dish at every family gathering even when he’s not hosting, undercooked the turkey and poisoned 6 of the 8 Thanksgiving guests.

No offense to your mom but a frozen turkey for 30 would take days to defrost anyway. 

My mother once left a pound of butter out on the counter to soften for baking, and later came into the kitchen to find that the dog (a collie mutt) had somehow managed to knock the four sticks to the floor and devour them. Only evidence was a bit of half-chewed paper wrapper.

My Beagle Farfel ate what was supposed to be our Easter ham the night before when mom put it on the kitchen table and forgot about it, and left the house. He weighed 38 pounds before the 7+ pound ham (A really good one, too, one of those high priced ones that are like 4 years old and really salty). He ate everything…

All of my childhood Thanksgivings were horrible. Due to the size of our family it was ‘smarter’ to rent a space (that shall not be named) where we would all fit. It was poorly heated, with folding chairs and tables and an industrial kitchen. It was cold, impersonal, unwelcoming and zero fun. The adults (men-folk fresh…

Thanksgiving at my in-laws:

About 6 or 7 years ago, while working retail and living with my grandparents, I was asked by my aunts to take care of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. I was okay with this, let all adult relatives know what they needed to bring, and let them know that I was going to cook something different since I dispise turkey;…

Mine is a meal that wasn’t. In the early 20-teens I reconnected with a friend I hadn’t hung out with in a bit in mid-October and had a good time. He asked what I was doing for Thanksgiving and I told him I hadn’t yet made plans so he invited me over to his friend’s house for a Friendsgiving. That sounded fun so I…

Where to start...every Thanksgiving has been a shitshow in my family. The year my sister was drunk before noon, forgot to turn on the oven and served a raw turkey that she insisted was cooked? The year my now ex-husband and I invited the drunk, chainsmoker neighbors and the father proceeded to hack so hard at the…

Back when I was a baby reince, my father passed away suddenly from cancer. It came on very quickly and he was only sick for a couple months before he passed away. No one knew it was cancer until the autopsy. His doctor thought it was a bad flu. Needless to say it was extremely traumatic for our family to lose him so…

One year, my family( and 16 year old me) go to my mom’s cousin’s house because she hasn’t hosted Thanksgiving in a while and she had offered to take a turn.We were told to “ come hungry”.

Oh, this is easy. The time my mother came to visit and brought Norovirus with her. First she went down, started vomiting all over our house, herself, everywhere. Then came the diarrhea, all over our house, herself, everywhere. All as we were serving the big meal.

You have to watch the labels on what you pull out of the fridge. My drunk friend pulled out a tub of mashed potatoes late one night and plowed through it. Next morning he wakes up and sees the tub on the counter. It was lard.

My parents went for a postprandial hike, and my stepmother had an aortic dissection and died, twenty minutes from help.

Our new Thanksgiving tradition is to drink brown liquors and cry.

You are ten times better than I will ever be as I would have noped out of there ages ago AND gave everyone my two-cents about their horrible children. Like, huge props for putting up with everyone.

I’ve got a great one. About 10 years ago, when I was still in my mid 20s and broke as most mid-20 year old are, I received an invitation from a female cousin to come over for Thanksgiving.

Didn’t ruin the entire meal, but we still talk about the time in 2008 that my dad, the designated gravy maker, pull a box of what he thought was chicken or turkey stock out of the fridge and instead proceeded to use concentrated chai latte mix as the base for the gravy.