Cracked Ribs, The 'Double Dragon' And Other Tales Of Thanksgivings Gone Horribly Wrong
Many people spend Thanksgiving making cherished memories with friends and family. Others spend the day getting through awkward conversations, dealing with broken bones or putting out fires.
If your Thanksgiving doesn’t go as planned, you aren’t alone. Because misery loves company, we gathered some stories of Thanksgiving dinners gone horribly wrong.
The Guest Who Was Expected To Cook The Whole Dinner
One Thanksgiving, everyone in Monika Florez’s immediate family had to work. Knowing she would be alone on Thanksgiving, Florez’s uncle invited her to spend the holiday with extended family. Florez doesn’t see her extended family very often so she was “excited to catch up on life,” she said.
To get ready, Florez had her nails done and put on her “Sunday best,” a “nice long skirt, a white top and heels.” Her uncle told her to arrive at 2 p.m. and she showed up on time expecting to see her family. When she arrived, she was the only guest there.
Florez’s uncle told her that the rest of the family wouldn’t be coming for another five hours. He explained that he had invited her over early to cook, set up and serve. Florez was angry, but her uncle saw nothing wrong with the situation. He explained that because Florez was the eldest daughter in her family and was known to be a great cook, it was her “obligation” to help.
Once Florez realized she had only been invited for her cooking skills, she decided to leave. She helped her uncle for an hour and then made a quick exit, but not before staining her white top. The next time she saw her uncle, Florez was respectful but kept her distance.
A Reminder To Save Deep-Fried Turkey For The Experts
Ronalyn Alston loves trying new recipes. One year, she planned on frying a whole turkey for the first time. Alston says her husband warned her to defrost the turkey first, but when her husband stepped out to run some errands she decided to plunge a frozen turkey into “flaming hot grease” in her backyard.
“I was so excited and wanted to show my husband and my dad that I could do it myself,” she said. “Let’s just say things got heated. ... There was a grease fire in my backyard. We quickly called the fire department and no turkey was carved that year,” she remembers.
“I burned the pot, oil was all over the yard, and all of the grass was ruined in that area,” she said.
Politics Isn’t Always The Worst Topic ...
Arguments about politics at the Thanksgiving table are nothing new. However, things took a strange turn for Lara Michaels, who spoke to the HuffPost on the condition of anonymity (her name has been changed).
Michaels was celebrating Thanksgiving with her parents and some of their friends when the conversation turned to Bill Cosby drugging women with quaaludes. Michaels assumed everyone around the Thanksgiving table would agree that this was wrong. However, one guest vehemently defended Cosby, insisting that he “hadn’t done anything wrong because everyone in the ’70s was slipping quaaludes into women’s drinks,” Michaels remembers.
A blowout fight ensued and Micheals kept her drink nearby the rest of the night. That guest was never invited back to Thanksgiving.
Ground Zero For A ‘Double Dragon’ Illness
“As a military family, we’re very used to atypical holidays,” Kathryn Butler shared. However, one year was even less typical than most.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, her husband was unexpectedly deployed. Butler originally planned to cut her losses and spend Thanksgiving eating takeout Chinese with her three children. Instead, she planned an impromptu Friendsgiving with other military families the weekend before the holiday.
Friendsgiving went off without a hitch. “Food was great, football was watched, kids played outside, everyone was happy,” Butler said. Then the trouble started. Two days later, one of her guests texted to ask “how everyone was doing.” One by one, almost everyone who attended Butler’s Friendsgiving feast came down with the “‘double dragon’, GI problems on both ends,” Butler said.
She hoped the illness was food poisoning that would pass quickly, but she quickly discovered that her Friendsgiving was ground zero for a norovirus that lasted days. Several Friendsgiving guests missed spending Thanksgiving with their families. When Thanksgiving Day rolled around, Butler and her children could only stomach toast, applesauce and white rice.
“Turns out my deployed husband was the only one out of the whole group that enjoyed a real Thanksgiving meal on Thanksgiving,” she said.
A Culture Clash For The Ages
When Elena Hung was in college, her then-boyfriend invited her to Thanksgiving dinner to meet his family for the first time. Everything went wrong.
Hung assumed that Thanksgiving dinner would start around 5 p.m. and went out for the day without her cell phone. Unbeknownst to Hung, her boyfriend’s family usually started Thanksgiving dinner at 2 p.m. When she showed up three hours late, she discovered that everyone had been waiting for her to start eating.
Then, when the hungry family started loading up their plates, Hung, who was a vegetarian at the time, discovered there was little she could eat. Although Hung had told her boyfriend that his family didn’t need him to make anything special for her, she assumed she would be able to eat the side dishes. However, she discovered dinner was “a good ’ole Southern meal. The collard greens were cooked in bacon fat, the mashed potatoes were prepared with chicken stock, and the stuffing had sausage,” she remembers. “I ended up eating sweet potato casserole and cornbread,” she said.
Then, to make things even more awkward, before the family started eating, her boyfriend’s mother asked her to say grace. “I think it was supposed to be a kind gesture, but I am not religious and had never said grace before,” she said. When the boyfriend’s mother noticed Hung was hesitating, she told her to say her “favorite prayer.” “I don’t remember exactly what I said. I was rambling and throwing in words like ‘thank you’ and ‘God’ over and over,” she said. The relationship didn’t last.
His Ribs Cracked Like A Wishbone
Before Thanksgiving guests arrived, Stephanie Wyatt’s father started cleaning the gutters. “A big gust of wind came and blew down the ladder,” Wyatt said. Her father said that he waited for someone to rescue him, but when nobody came by he decided to jump.
According to Wyatt, when her father landed “his knees came up under his ribs.” Instead of asking for help, Wyatt’s father acted as though nothing happened. “He wasn’t supposed to be up there in the first place,” so he didn’t tell anyone he was hurt and helped clean the house to get ready for guests, Wyatt explained.
Wyatt’s family became suspicious when her father barely ate anything for dinner. “He finally admitted what happened and we took him to the ER,” Wyatt said. He was diagnosed with broken ribs and bruised his liver, spleen and diaphragm. “The doc said he was lucky his spleen and liver didn’t burst on impact,” she said. Wyatt’s father was sore for a while but had fully recovered by the following Thanksgiving.
A Guest Who Was Isolated And Excluded
Brianne Berger, who is deaf, was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner where no one seemed interested in communicating with her. Berger can read lips, but in the chaos of Thanksgiving, she had a hard time following the conversation.
“Lip reading doesn’t work in a large group of people” because it’s only possible to follow one person at a time, she explained. Berger said she can join in conversations when multiple people are talking as long as others are “mindful to make sure I’m following and that I’m still participating.” This Thanksgiving, no one made an effort to include Berger, including some guests who knew sign language.
When Berger asked other guests what they said, they responded with “‘Nevermind’ or ‘I will tell you later,’” followed by a laugh. “Sitting at a table and not understanding a word anyone says” was disheartening, Berger explained.
After three hours, Berger left without saying goodbye. “Not a single person noticed,” she said. Berger explained that “dinner table syndrome,” which causes a “feeling of isolation and exclusion” among deaf and hard-of-hearing people, is common at gatherings like Thanksgiving. “It’s extremely discouraging to make a lot of effort to cook, buy food, drive, or travel a long way just to be left out,” she said. Berger now attends Thanksgiving dinners that are more welcoming, although she wishes more hearing people would make an effort to include her.
