I’ll never forget the first Thanksgiving that my oldest brothers girlfriend (now his wife) came for dinner. She said some words that changed my life forever.

Not my story, but friends of mine were outed as swingers at Thanksgiving dinner once. A fundamentalist sister found out via the internet that the young couple were in the Lifestyle and blabbed all in front of God and Grandma and the mashed potatoes.

Oh boy, i’ve got a doozy.

My Thanksgiving horror story is still unfolding.

I'm American Indian so Thanksgiving is the holiday where we give thanks our tribe survived.

This isn’t mine, but my mother’s: when she was seven, she went out with her family to a turkey farm to pick out a turkey. After getting chased and pecked for a half hour by angry birds, my tearful mother resigned herself to waiting in the backseat of the car while my grandparents finished up their business.

One year my mother put the turkey in the oven and accidentally set it to “clean.” This setting heats the oven to 1000 degrees and locks the oven door for several hours. Panic ensued when she tried to open the door to baste the turkey, and discovered her error. We had almost resigned ourselves to watching the bird…

When I was sixteen, my whole family got together at our house for Thanksgiving. This is a big extended family, all of whom are complete drunks. I was in my hippie phase and used to like to make people sit around and listen to me play the guitar and sing Dar Williams songs (sorry, guys). After a particularly…

Once upon a time I was Queen of the Mashed Potatoes land. Then at the age of seven they became a wave of thick glue inside my mouth and I would become nauseous. I begged and pleaded not to have mashed potatoes on my plate to no avail.

I graduated from boot camp the day before Thanksgiving. During the 12 hour drive home I got to hear all of the family gossip including that my uncle came out of the closet. My uncle was adopted shortly after I was born and we were pretty much raised together - so him being gay was anything but news to me. The next day…

You win

So the first year I had moved away from my family on the east coast and was living in California I spent Thanksgiving with my now in laws. I wasn’t told ahead of time that they didn’t really do thanksgiving, I just got an invitation. I came in and it was just his parents and his sister (which would have been ok, they…

as a Brit, I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving (seriously, guys that’s a damn strange holiday) so it looks like I’ll have to come back later and bask in all the schadenfreude because Jezzies never let me down with pissing contests.

My mother in law walked in the door with this article clutched in her fist for my husband (really for me, the liberal heathen) to read. Sigh...

One time my college-age brother, who is bipolar but refuses to be medicated, felt that Thanksgiving was an appropriate time to hold himself hostage with a gun to his head in the back yard, demanding that our dad give him money (more than he already was) to buy drugs. So then the cops came and he was forcibly strapped…

One year we all had the flu on Thanksgiving day, but my mom prepared dinner anyway, even though none of were up to eating, or even getting out of bed. You know how sometimes you’re too sick to even watch TV? We were that sick, all of us, but mom went ahead and started cooking.

Last year my brother’s fiance’s daughter’s boyfriend declared Natives a “pestilence”.

It pains me to tell this story because it inevitbaly leads to my sister being the golden child for the decade after this story.

I live in a building with my landlord. Below our apartments is a small, privately owned photography shop.

I have 2 memories which have gone a long way towards me finding this holiday a total waste of energy: 1, my brother puking over the table so hard that the Thanksgiving dinner was awash in his barf, and 2, my mother pitching such a fit in the kitchen that she threw a hot saucepan full of gravy at my dad and me. So,…