Tell Us Your Thanksgiving Horror Stories

Welcome, friends, to another round of Thanksgiving terror. Right now, you’re probably about to make some awful memories, so why not share them with us, your loving internet family, so that we can all laugh and cry together?

Listen, we know Thanksgiving can be an awful holiday that ends with an overturned table (when you just can’t handle your dad’s Mexican jokes anymore) or a crying jag under the put-up-too-early Christmas tree (not proud, but it’s happened), and that’s okay. Families can sometimes kind of suck. So can friends. And cats. And even the fucking dude from the pizza place who brings you your extra large supreme and tries to get a look inside your house to determine whether anyone else is there or whether you will be, as he suspects, eating your pizza naked and alone while you enjoy episode after episode of Jessica Jones (which is very good).

The only way we’re going to get through the trauma, though—especially if your therapist is on vacation right now—is by coming together and commiserating. Misery loves company and Thanksgiving is just a warmup for the inevitable disappointment that is Christmas (when your husband will, once again, refuse you a cat).

To get you started, here’s my absolute favorite tale of horror (which was posted on Gawker before I even worked here!). It’s about poop and it’s by Justlainey:

My first Thanksgiving with the family of my soon to be husband. The house was completely full of guests and the toilets had been working overtime. No one told me that. Gorgeous formal dinner with copious toasting and rich, dreamy food. My body was a running machine in those days and I was consuming mostly healthy food leading up to this moment.

Well, 30 minutes after lunch I began to feel very uncomfortable. Very. So I snuck off to one of the guest bedrooms upstairs, which unfortunately for me was located directly above the library where everyone had gathered to “digest”. After I began to feel some relief and started to feel human again, the toilet decided that I was the person and this was the moment to stop admitting new contents all together. As I flushed there was a discernible pop, gurgle and then a volcano of waste and water began to saturate the floor.

After what seemed like an eternity, I managed to turn off the water at the source and was left standing in a 2 inch lake of shit. As I stood in stunned horror there was a frantic knocking at the door. It was my mother-in-law warning me not to flush. “Too late” I managed to whisper. She scurried off and I was left sobbing in mortification. In a flash, she brought back a stack of old towels, bleach and a bucket and I got to work.

Finally, after 30 minutes of hysterical cleaning, crying and laughing, I managed to sanitize myself and the bathroom. However, to my horror as I walked down the stairs and looked into the library, I saw a bucket brigade and a frantic swarm of people up on step ladders holding towels up to a soaking, dripping roof. Yep, my shit was raining on my future family. I ran out of the house and refuse to play in the croquet tournament the next day. The marriage didn’t last.

What have you got, faithful commentariat? How can you top the poop? And if you can’t, how will you try?