5 Thanksgiving Disasters You're Probably Not Prepared For
When you're a kid, Thanksgiving is something Mom or Grandma takes care of, and "dinner parties" in general are things fancy people on TV do. But sooner than you think, you will reach an age where you'll be expected to host meals for other people. And there is never more pressure to get this right than on Thanksgiving. If dinner parties are like group sex, Thanksgiving is like starring in porn. The lights are on, the camera is recording and everyone's good time rests entirely on your boner.
So the day has arrived. The food is bought. You've spent a full work day cleaning up empty beer cans and strategically placing furniture over wine-colored vomit stains. You are ready to eat and thank the shit out of some shit.
Or are you? Because ...
#5. If You Fuck Up the Turkey, People Will Die
Maybe you're in your 20s and are having to throw your first Thanksgiving away from home. Maybe you're older, and Mom finally got taken to jail for dog fighting. Either way, you've laid down the turkey gauntlet and decided to throw everybody a Thanksgiving that will make your Mom's look like a big pile of shit.
So it's less than a week before the holiday, and before you read another word of this article, you need to have a frozen turkey in your possession. You don't need to be physically holding it right now while you're reading, though I'd prefer it if you were. At the very least, it needs to be in your freezer. There are a couple of reasons for this.
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Don't get ahead of us, asshole.
The first is that people tend to procrastinate on the holidays. Two days before Thanksgiving, you won't be able to enter a grocery store without having to cancel your plans for the evening because every person in town will be making a last minute mad dash for the same core ingredients that make up every Thanksgiving dinner in the country. And it doesn't matter how small your list is. The 15 people in front of you with full carts dictate your time spent in line.
But more importantly, most stores carry frozen turkeys because they go bad really fast. If they sell you a bacteria-contaminated turkey, that can put a motherfucker in a hospital bed as fast as an escaped dog fighting champion, and that's generally frowned upon by most business owners. People in America consider it rude to sell poison meat. Turkeys are also pretty big, so they take a while to thaw. Setting it out on the counter at room temperature, thinking the warm air will help speed things along, is a pretty good way to make everyone at your party shoot liquid filth out of every orifice of their body for the next several days.
Via Businessweek.com
The challenge is what makes Thanksgiving special.
The safest way to thaw one out is to put it in the refrigerator about four days before cooking it. Yes. Four fucking days. That's how long you have to plan ahead for just that part. To be more precise, it's 24 hours in the fridge for every 4-5 lbs. of turkey.
You've done all of that. It's the night before, and you're now cooking your bird. Awesome. "Wait, what's that burning plastic smell," you ask? It's the fucking plastic bag full of guts they crammed inside the turkey. Yes, they do that. They bag up the extra parts like the neck, gizzards, livers, testicles, etc. and cram it back into the body cavity. Most even come with a bag of concentrated gravy made out of the bird's tortured soul. And unless you pull the legs apart and cram your hand up inside, you'd never know they were there. Note to editor: I have done the research, and there is no joke that can be made about that last line.
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None at all.
Oh shit, did you take into account any vegetarian guests? Those people are all over the place now. It's not just a matter of, "Well, they can eat the sides and leave the turkey for us." Uh, you remember how the baked beans have bacon in them? And the noodles were made with chicken broth? And the green bean casserole has bacon in it? And how Grandma's cranberry sauce recipe has bacon fat in it? And how the bacon punch is nothing but ground up bacon? You're going to have to take a moment to make sure those guests aren't sitting there with a roll and some corn. And you have to plan all this ahead because you have to...
#4. Stock Up on the Three B's: Beer, Butter and Toilet Paper
Let me give you a quick scenario. It's 8:00 p.m. Everyone is finished eating, and you're all gathered around the TV, screaming obscenities at a football game that doesn't involve your favorite team but that everyone watches out of tradition, because it's an excuse to not have to talk to each other.
Uncle Mitch walks into the room with an empty beer box, and he's pointing at it and crying. At the same time, four people stand outside of a closed bathroom door, clutching their stomachs and weighing the pros and cons of dropping a deuce into your sink. Grandma finally exits the bathroom and announces, "You're out of toilet paper. I had to wipe my ass on your shower curtain."
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"Honestly, I was going to do that anyway."
"Fuck," you gasp. "Mitch drank the last beer."
If you're lucky enough to live in a town that has a store that stays open on Thanksgiving, then awesome -- you just have to deal with the other thousand people in line who all forgot to stock up on shit and then get back to your party. If you live in a small town like mine, it means driving 30 minutes to the next town that does have an open store, spending another 30 minutes getting the stuff and another 20 minutes waiting in line at the register, and then another 30 minutes back. Those people outside the bathroom needed to go 20 minutes ago. The beer drinkers are now cooking something with leftover cranberries, yeast and the copper pipes that they removed from your sink.
In a family of drinkers, things get ugly fast. At one of my family's gatherings years ago my uncles and I found ourselves organizing a trip to the next state because it had the only place that sold booze on Thanksgiving. And they were only open for another two hours. We were like Jack Bauer in 24 racing across town to defuse a nuclear sobriety bomb.
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"ALCOHOLICS ... mount up."
What we learned that day is that you have to overstock everything. A case of beer in my family lasted about 40 minutes. Hell, back then, I could take care of a case all by myself. Plan out what you think you need and then triple that order.
Especially butter. Yeah, it turns out that pretty much everything you cook on Thanksgiving requires butter. So by the time the rolls are passed around, you have none to put on them because you've used it all in cooking.
And toilet paper. Have I mentioned that? If you're male and you're in charge of shopping, this is something you'll overlook. ("Ah, we're fine, there's most of a roll left there.") We're used to needing it once, maybe twice a day (depending on our levels of Tabasco use in the previous week). We forget that women need it every time they go. And that kids use 10 times too much. And that Uncle Mitch has chronic diarrhea from his constant drinking and from eating all that butter.
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"Can I get another one of these except without all that toast?"
#3. You Don't Have Enough Dishes, and You Sure as Fuck Don't Have Enough Chairs
When you think of Thanksgiving, you always picture the eating part, not the preparation. So when you're going over the dishes situation you think, "OK, I have eight people coming over, so I'm going to need eight plates, eight forks and I have a dozen glasses if you count the collectible Shrek glasses I got from McDonald's eight years ago ..." Nope. The cooking and serving parts of the meal mean you're off by about 50 percent.
My first Thanksgiving dinner I ever cooked was pretty ambitious -- if you're going to do that shit, you do it right -- that is, until I got about halfway through the preparation and realized that I didn't have nearly enough bowls and dishes to serve the food in. Of course by the time I found that out, it was too late to go buy more, so I had to just start removing items from the menu instead. It was either that or piling green bean casserole and scalloped potatoes directly on the table.
Yeah, you probably have enough plates -- when you buy plates you get like eight of them and you probably have that many more odd mismatched ones you've wound up with on accident. But how many serving dishes do you have? This is something you literally never use in bachelor life because you're never going to serve an elaborate family-style dinner for yourself, I don't care how fat you are.
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"Happy Tuesday!"
In a panic, you'll think, "Well, I can just serve the food out of the pots and pans I cooked them in, but there's a problem with that. Putting a shitload of hot pans on a table isn't wise. Especially if there are kids around. Not to mention that you'll probably be short on pans and have to reuse some of them to make different sides. After all, how many sauce pans do you own? Enough to hold five different side dishes that all have to be heated at the same time?
And you can't carve a turkey and just drop the meat back into the disgusting looking disposable pan. The bottom of that thing is filled with grease and nasty looking floaty things. So you'll need to find a big-ass plate to pile all of the meat up. No, you can't just leave the bird intact and let the guests carve their own. Ninety percent of humans can't take a piece of meat apart without either destroying the meat or their own hands. There's a reason Uncle Mitch drinks so much and only needs one and a half gloves in December.
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He's the only guy in the family who can count to decimal places by using his fingers.
OK, so maybe you've taken care of all that. Once you have all of your food in its respective serving bowls/plates, you're going to find that you don't have enough big spoons to dip it all up. And before the meal is even served, you'll open your cabinet to find that every glass in the house is now dirty. People have been at your house for hours, the ones not pounding beers need something to drink, and they'll be damned if they'll actually keep track of their glass so they can use it at meal time. Kids especially have a tendency to use a glass once and then promptly lose it or put it in the dirty dishes pile.
The easy solution to this is to buy an assload of plastic cups. You can do the same with plates, but you have to be careful with what type you choose. Don't make the mistake of buying paper plates. Half of what you're eating is prepared in some sort of liquid, and that shit will soak right through. Styrofoam isn't much better because any pressure you put on those things will crack them -- and the time you saved by not doing dishes will instead be spent cleaning up the floor that is now covered in meat juice. This is the one area where you'll want to spend a little extra and buy the sturdy plastic disposables. It's Thanksgiving, people. Don't be afraid to get fancy.
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"Holy shit, John, did you get a promotion?"
Oh, and you don't have enough chairs. What do you got? Four chairs around your dining room or kitchen table? A rolling office chair at your computer ... and then what? You don't have 10 goddamn dining room chairs -- why would you? But you better figure out something. You think people want to eat Thanksgiving dinner sitting ass-to-ass on your sofa, trying to balance that shit on their lap? What if all of the sofa people hate each other?
Speaking of which ...
Hmm. I'll admit that I usually read Cracked with an eye for things to pick apart (I'm disagreeable like that), and also that I usually end up nitpicking dumb stuff because the articles are pretty spot-on. But the whole first page here...
ReplyGrocery stores two days before Thanksgiving are not the nightmare everyone imagines. I know this because it's when I do the bulk of my shopping. Grocery stores *on* Thanksgiving are pretty awful, but still not the hell-dimension you might think. It's a bit more crowded than usual, and you might end up waiting a few minutes longer at the checkout -- unless you've got the brains to use the self-checkout machines now in practically every grocery store and ignored by practically every shopper. I can understand my 93-year-old grandmother being baffled by the things, but why the hell is everyone else avoiding the quick and easy way out?
Most of the rest of the first page just makes me think dudes must be functionally retarded. That's it, isn't it? This is aimed at stereotypical bachelor guys who have never stepped foot in a kitchen? Because I really can't imagine not being able to guess how many dishes it might take to prepare and serve a meal, or how much butter you need, or that the giblets are inside the turkey. (Come on, have you never even *heard* someone talk about cooking a turkey? Never seen a TV show where some girly-girl is too squicked out to stick her hand inside and pull them out?) I can see maybe overlooking something and having to quickly rinse out a pan, but for fuck's sake, if you know what ingredients to shop for that implies you've at least glanced at recipes, all of which tell you what you're going to need to cook the stuff in. And yeah, most of it can be served in what it was cooked in, because hardly any of it's getting cooked in long-handled pots and pans. Think about it, half of most Thanksgiving dinners tend to be casserole-type dishes. The rest goes in your bowls, which are going otherwise unused because who's eating out of a bowl on Thanksgiving?
Beer, butter, plastic plates and cups? If you've ever hosted any sort of gathering, you should know that these are top-of-the-list items. I'll admit that having been raised by the aforementioned 93-year-old grandmother I tend to have no less than a 24-pack of toilet paper in the house at all times, but most folks probably don't, so I won't comment further on that one. And the chair thing's absolutely true.
I want to say, as someone who has worked in a grocery, that I f*****g hate you.
I tend to be a bit of a loner, so actually having to eat with other people is pretty much torture. Especially since last thanksgiving, we had my friend, her kids and her boyfriend over and he would NOT. SHUT. THE FUCK. UP. about anything or leave my friend alone. Mom ended up kicking him out because he was getting abusive and she didn't want him cussing in front of the kids.
ReplyDid anyone else read the title of #5 in the Joker voice?
ReplyI'm a man of my word.
*laughs maniacally*
I didn't; then I went back and re-read it.
I f*****g love you.
I'm glad we don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia
ReplyAre you the same person who was also glad that they don't celebrate Halloween in Australia? And if so, is that what you do? Write comments about how you're so glad to be in Australia?
WHY WOULD YOU GET RID OF THE SCALLOPED POTATOES? THEY ARE BETTER THAN THE TURKEY
ReplyEverything is better than the turkey.
Don't know what kind of turkey you guys are eating...
Doesn't sound like most people have anything to be thankful of on Thanksgiving. What a fucked up holiday.
ReplyFortunately, my Thanksgiving went off without a hitch. Then again, it was a relatively small gathering with the family mostly watching movies. All I did was eat, then use the Internet, and later watched Impact Wrestling that night. Hopefully, Christmas will be the same.
Replyhopefully not the PPV where Jeff Hardy was stoned out of his gourd & nearly flushed the whole company down the toilet?
ALCOHOLICS, mount up! lol
ReplyBoy am I glad that I live in Australia, my Dad, his family and me are vegetarians, I don't have solid associations with my family and my mother is dead. What a great selection of reasons not to have to worry about any of these things.
ReplyAlas, there's always christmas
Ah, Mr. Cheese...as always, a good article. The picture with the plastic plates and the promotion caption hit my sweet spot, I started laughing uncontrollably and couldn't stop for a full minute.
Reply*looked at knife fight picture*
ReplyI think I like men, now.
Warning: this picture is not a typical example.
This year I could just feel everything about to get out of hand (knife fight) style all around me. I had to grit my teeth several times and no one on that side of my family knows when to shut up and move on. Bring up crap form a two years ago, etc. And my situation was far from the worst. Druggie relatives asking us to send plates to their house bc they were high, divorced couples rotating in and out, people not showing bc other ppl were there, people leaving as soon as they pulled up.When it was all over my aunt who threw it said "WOW that went really well! So much better than last year!" (I was a dodger last year.)
ReplyYou can tell the dissenters in the comments have never lived in a 14x14 ft basement apartment with 2 plates, 3 bowls, a fork and a cup.
ReplyThat's fancy. I have one bowl, one plate, one fork knife spoon, and a two mugs (one was a gift).
This was awesome. I want John to have Thanksgiving with me and mine next year. As long as he brings his own chair. And butter.
ReplyYou left out the fact that the person making the meal you have to eat may be doing it wasted. My mom is trashed by 11a.m. Every. Fucking. Year. One year she was so drunk, she just kept putting powdered sugar into the gravy instead of flour and couldn't figure out why it wasn't thickening. So assuming there was no way she could do that two years in a row, the next year my brother thought it would be hilarious to put powdered sugar in the flour container, and for good measure, in case she checked it first, he put laundry detergent in the powdered sugar container. Most of our family traditions are unhealthy if not lethal.
ReplyYou forgot about the perils of eating other peoples food when you have a severe allergy....nothing is worse than a visit to the hospital on thanksgiving.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesThanksgiving has me convinced I'm allergic to some mystery ingreident I have apparently never used for anything myself.
The premise of the article is that you are cooking the dinner. So shut the f**k up, because your comment doesn't apply.
^Well, it kind of does apply, considering that if you're the one cooking, there's always the risk of using an ingredient you are not entirely aware someone is allergic to, or has trouble digesting.
I'm not talking about peanut allergy or an inability to digest gluten, but for instance, if you use diary, there's always the chance someone is lactose-intolerant and you might not be quite aware of that.
Yeah...Becuase you HAVE to have all the food on the tables...Im sorry but have you ever done your own thanksgiving diner? because all that food sure as hell isn't hot when you serve it hahaha.
ReplyIt is if you do it right. Sorry you suck.
I come from a place where we don't celebrate thanksgiving, however we recently had a small gathering at my house 50-60 people and we had to consider all of this. things turned out well, we borrowed chairs, had plenty of food, bought disposable serving dishes, asked a professional if we had enough booze, he said we had to much so we bought more, we invited all the wrong people but the trouble makers didn't show, forgot to cater to vegetarians and one of the kids fixed the ps2. The only thing we forgot is babies can't eat steak, but he was cool with just headbanging.
ReplyAs always John Cheese's article is only useful to those who are retarded and/or an alcoholic. I planned my first Thanksgiving at 22 for myself and 7 other people anddidnt experince any of this issues because of common sense and the fact hat I wasn't black out drunk for every thanksgiving the 5 years prior...so I piced up little tips like "have serving dishes" and "people like to use toilet paper". Seriously what kind of idiot didn't already know all of this?
Replyyou planned a little dinner for 8 people and you think it wasn't hard? well no f*****g shit. I used to live with 7 people and 2 of them needed some caring. It's easy to say planning a gathering is easy when you can count the people on your fingers. It's not a matter of not knowing it's that stuff gets pushed aside when you have 50+ people coming for dinner, and Auntie is lactose intolerant,an and Joey is vegetarian but Kate has to have red meat cause she's got low iron, and Uncle is catholic so he has to have fish so Sue cant sit near him because she's allergic to seafood. and I have to pick up Dad from the airport in 10 minutes but i can't leave because the gravy will burn. So excuse me if i may have forgotten little things like toilet paper which I should have had on account of I buy it on a regular basis and I forgot we only had half a roll left. But seriously what kind of an idiot must I be?
The biggest issue we have at my house is the food that we make to cover everyone who said they would show up, but the don't show up. I'm talking 15 pies, for 30 people, and only 5 people show up. You do the math.
ReplyI have done the math, and the result is delicious gluttony.
Pies are good and not SO un-nutritious that you can't donate them to a homeless shelter, or soup kitchen, even partially "eaten" ones, since people take a slice and don't just eat the pie straight out of the dish. Usually.