Seasonal & Holidays
Top 5 Thanksgiving Horror Stories
We're counting down the worst of the worst Thanksgiving stories survived by Patch staffers. May your holiday be nothing like these.
We're sad to say that it gets much, much worse than accidentally drying out the turkey. Just ask any one of these Patch staffers who lived through these epic Thanksgiving fails.
#5 Ice Storm Stranded
"My first year out of college, I was working for a small daily newspaper in Iowa. The state was hit with a horrible ice storm, so I couldn't drive to Missouri to have Thanksgiving with my family. But, a woman who worked at the paper ordered me to come spend the day with her family — she had 3 daughters close to me in age. It was a generous offer and made the day much more bearable." —Deb Belt, Maryland Editor
#4 Airport Fiasco
"I was stuck in the airport in Milwaukee until about 6 pm, and injured my arm and back running through the airport with all my bags. When I finally got home, my family already got fat without me." —Mae Horgan, Account Manager based in New York
#3 No-Power Problems
"We had maybe a dozen people coming to our house one year and my mom had the works going on in the kitchen. The turkey had been in for an hour or so when our electricity just cut. Something in our house's wiring just malfunctioned, and we weren't able to get any electricity at all. We had to rush the half-cooked turkey to our friend's house to use her oven and had dishes cooking at probably four different houses. I don't know if I've ever seen my mom so stressed. Somehow, we transported everything back to the house for mealtime, but electricity was still out, so we had to have a very intimate, candlelit Thanksgiving huddled around our dining room table. My parents worked at my high school and I remember that my principal was there — I was mortified." —Anicka Slachta, Chicago Editor
#2 A Feast with No Hands
"I fell down an entire flight of stairs the night before and broke both of my hands, leaving me pretty much useless. My boyfriend was meeting my grandparents for the first time for Thanksgiving dinner, and he had to feed me the entire meal. Talk about embarrassing!" —Katie Kausch, New Jersey Editor
#1 The Crappiest Thanksgiving Ever
"A pre-thanksgiving football game ended in disaster for my friend, Ted, when he passed out in a handicapped Porta Potty. While he was passed out, the Porta Potty was picked up and taken to the Porta Potty holding yard. Ted woke up the next morning covered in potty fluid and promptly got sick. How much worse could it get? A lot. The toilets were placed door to door, so Ted found himself trapped. Ted was not slim. However, he somehow managed to wiggle through a sharp plastic "window" and fall head first between the stacked Porta Potties. He then had to climb up to the top of the toilets and leap from toilet to toilet to escape the holding yard, repeatedly falling between the canonically shaped units. The last hurdle was climbing over a barb-wired fence, leaving him with cuts. Ted always wanted to be either a politician or a comedian. He is now both, working as a state senator." —Charlie Hale, Patch Chairman
Photo credit: Dimitris Kalogeropoylos via Flickr
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