Thanksgiving is supposed to be a fun, cheery holiday spent with loved ones and delicious food. Unfortunately, sometimes life just gets in the way and turns the much-loved holiday into a big, huge fail. If you’re dreading the small talk with nosy relatives or fearing you might burn down the house while frying the turkey, we hate to say that your fears might not be unfounded.
In honor of this holiday that has bred many memories both good and bad, here are the biggest Thanksgiving fail stories we found online. So grab a drink, heat up some leftovers, and check out these Thanksgiving stories that are probably worse than yours. Hey, at least there’s Black Friday.
Turkey with a side of virus
Ever wondered what it would be like if the Thanksgiving dinner your whole family ate made just about everyone sick? Now you don’t have to.
Reddit user voiceofnoreason said this very thing happened to them one year. A virus brought home by a relative who was a nurse made everyone violently sick within a week of the meal.
All but two lucky family members at the dinner were vomiting, had diarrhea, and nearly had to be hospitalized. We guess it’s pretty safe to say that no one will have much of an appetite for turkey and stuffing at next year’s dinner. Perhaps they can order a pizza instead?
That’s my turkey skin!
We’ve all heard the regular Thanksgiving fail stories. Kitchens catching fire? Sure. Turkey burned to a crisp? Old news. One relative stabbing the other? Wait…what?
In response to “What’s the Craziest Family Drama You’ve Experienced on Thanksgiving?” question posted on Buzzfeed two years ago, user taylorw4ccb59fca told the story of two aunts who got into an argument over who had dibs on the last piece of turkey skin. We know how delicious turkey skin is, but what happened next is pretty crazy.
Things quickly turned when one stabbed the other in the hand with the carving knife during the altercation. Not surprisingly, the injured aunt spent Thanksgiving in the hospital being treated for the wound. No word on whether the other aunt visited her in the hospital.
“They’re cool now, though,” wrote taylorw4ccb59fca.
Well, that’s good to know. Maybe next year the carving equipment should be kept in a safe place?
You took out that pizza box before turning on the oven…right?
Cooking disasters – they sure love to happen when you’ve got all your relatives and friends over, don’t they? Ashley A. told The Indianapolis Star about one Thanksgiving experience the family would probably like to forget.
Ashley noted that she decided to help her mom in making a Thanksgiving dinner. It was the first time the pair decided to do this in three years, as she’d been away at college. All was going well until it was time to pre-heat the oven. No one thought to look inside, but if they had, they would have seen an old pizza box.
“Needless to say, the pizza box caught on fire, and my mom ran through the house carrying the box outside with oven mitts,” Ashley A. noted.
Note to self: don’t leave old pizza boxes in the oven. Like, ever.
Re-thinking that five-second rule
Ever dropped a piece of food on the ground, picked it up, blew on it a little, then popped it in your mouth? Admit it, we’ve all used the five second rule with fallen food. But Twitter user kristenwarwick’s story might make us think twice about that time-honored guideline.
According to a blog featuring tweets of Thanksgiving fails posted three years ago, kristenwarwick dropped a piece of food under the table, then picked it up and ate it.
“It wasn’t food; it was a moth,” she noted, adding #thanksgivingfail to the post.
Needless to say, that’s a sure-fire way to ruin your appetite. Yuck. In fact, we don’t even want to think about what that scenario would have been like.
Murphy’s Law
Thanksgiving dinner usually doesn’t last more than three hours, max. What can go wrong in three hours?
A lot, as it turns out.
Buzzfeed user Ktsjo411‘s Thanksgiving fail story included a bunch of stuff that would have made even the biggest Thanksgiving veteran flailing, including a mother going into labor, the turkey catching fire, and the dishwasher flooding the kitchen.
To top off an already intense meal, “the person making the stuffing didn’t know you were supposed to cook the sausage before putting it into the stuffing so we all ate raw meat,” Ktsjo411 noted.
Hey, at least that makes for a pretty interesting story the family will be laughing about for years to come…right?
Even Martha Stewart fails at Thanksgiving
If you’re feeling a bit discouraged about your own Thanksgiving fails, you can rest a little easier knowing that a Turkey Day cooking disaster has happened to the person you’d least expect it to happen to. As Martha Stewart recounted in a Daily Mail essay, the very first Thanksgiving she’d ever hosted ended up with a burned turkey.
“Weary and bleary-eyed at 3 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day, I turned on the oven, stuffed the turkey, and struggled to get the enormous bird into the electric oven by 3:45,” Stewart said. “I went back to sleep only to awake to a house full of black smoke — the turkey was burning! My husband ran downstairs and I followed, thinking of how embarrassed I would be to serve Thanksgiving dinner without turkey. Indeed, the bird was hopelessly charred! (My fateful mistake? I preheated the oven to 500 degrees, then forgot to turn it down to 325.)”
So even if you do end up with overly charred turkey this Thanksgiving, take a breather. It’s even happened to Martha Stewart.
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