Nov 30, 2009 12:46 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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Thanks to all of our lovely, scarred, dysfunctional, boozy, bad-cooking readers, we were more full of Thanksgiving Horror Stories than a Macy's parade balloon is full of helium. We selected the best (or is it worst?) and crowned a winner.
If you want to see all the stories, visit the comments section of the original post. All of the stories tend to fall into certain genres—cooking nightmares, drunken exploits, family drama, death, illness, and general destruction—so we've picked out some of our favorites so that you don't have to read all 500 or so horror stories like some of us had to. Here are our runners up. The titles are ours, but these stories are all yours:
And the Ultimate Award for Thanksgiving Horror and the $50 prize for a bottle of Wild Turkey goes to DrunkExpatWriter, for his two-fold tale of his family behaving badly. The full story is reprinted below for everyone to enjoy and so that we can all laugh at his pain to make our pain a little bit more bearable.
Here's the winning tale:
Ok. I have two stories for you. Roughly 13 years ago my family got together at my parent's house for Thanksgiving. My step mom and her brother have always had a "tumultuous" relationship. After dinner they got into an argument over who loved their long dead mother more. Shit was thrown around, plates broken, the usual. My dad tried to calm them down to no avail. So, he decided he had to distract them. He'd just gotten a Dodge conversion van, so he went out and fired it up and started ramming it at the cars of all our relatives - totaling roughly 10 cars until my step mom and uncle noticed and stopped fighting with each other in order to yell at him.
Now, second story. The next year, my dad decided that having people over to the house for Thanksgiving was a bad idea. So he booked us all into this super fancy restaurant and paid to put all the relatives in a swank hotel next door - on the assumption that people would be more well behaved in public.
Everything went well during the meal, until the check arrived. The waiter then put the check near my uncle rather than my step mom (who insists on handling all the financial shit for her and my dad.)
Her brother then said "See, you can talk about liberation all you want, but classy people know a man is supposed to pay."
My step mom then upended the table and grabbed the carving knife and tried to stab her brother to death. He took me, my dad and my brother to literally hurl her off of him.
In a matter of minutes the cops arrived (small New Jersey town.)
While my step mom and my uncle were trying to tell the cops they didn't want to press charges against each other, my dad walked up to one of the cop cars, unzipped and pissed on the cop car's tires.
Flash forward two hours later to me, my then-wife and various cousins pooling our money to bail all three of them out of jail.
Congratulations go to DrunkExpatWriter for giving us reason to believe our family isn't so bad. You can either pick up your booze at Gawker HQ (the lawyers say mailing it's dicey) or email Gabriel to tell him where to send a $50 check to spend on the libation of your choice.
Feel free to continue to add stories to the official compendium of misery in the original post, and in the comments, tells us what a crappy job we did picking the winner and provide links to your favorite tales (you can get a permalink to the comments by clicking on the date below the commenter's name).
And while we're glad that we didn't have to live through any of these tales of terror, we would like to thank you all for the memories. Christmas is going to be a doozy!
Send an email to Brian Moylan, the author of this post, at brian@gawker.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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