Your Most Embarrassing Holiday Party Stories

It’s office holiday party season and you know what that means—spending precious post-work hours with a bunch of people who you’d never elect to spend your time with and trying to walk the fine line between drunk enough to make your coworkers bearable and so drunk that you end up horrifying your boss. Of course, sometimes—despite your best efforts—that doesn’t go so well. Those are the stories we want to hear for this week’s Pissing Contest.

But first, our winners from Thanksgiving!

Honorary mention to The Gaysian, a true Thanksgiving hero:

It’s not much of a horror story…

It was 12 years ago, my mother was 8 months pregnant. Right after she sat down at the table, her water broke. Right before dinner. It was a quick, and very messy labor on the dining room floor. My dad was not that much help. I called the ambulance, and they were there within 15 minutes. And that’s how my sister was born.

And as a side-note, thanks to that experience, I now know how to help someone give birth.

First runner-up, thesquarerootof:

My freshman year of college, I was far from home (I am from CO, college was in PA), and knew I probably wouldn’t have the money to fly back for dinner. My roommate offered to let me come back to New Hampshire with her and I agreed. A bunch of friends offered me places but I had already agreed to go with the roommate. Then, the day we were supposed to leave, and when everyone else had mostly already left, my roommate informs me “Oh, I forgot to ask my parents, and turns out we’re actually going elsewhere and it’s not really a situation where we can bring a guest so…”

I was not amused.

The only other person stuck in the dorms besides me was an international student who refused to come out of her room because she was working on a paper. One of my professors invited me to his place for Thanksgiving, and even offered to pick me up. “You can celebrate with my family!” He said. Wonderful, I’ll make some devilled eggs, maybe bring a pie as well, and I won’t be alone. Meanwhile, I had two days with no car in a college town that has been utterly deserted and I’m extroverted as fuck, so I’m losing my mind by the time dinner rolls around. He picks me up, it’s all good.

I then find out that “have Thanksgiving with my family” means “be the only guest with me and my parents and PS they only kind of speak English”. So…I sit through an incredibly awkward meal with a professor, his parents who only speak some English, and me. That’s it. That is everyone. It is awkward.

He then takes me back to the dorm, where I proceed to lose my FREAKING mind. I watch the only DVD I have with me (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) literally three times in a row, call my family long enough to feel miserable that I’m not with them, and proceed to slowly unravel from lack of social interaction. Friday passes. Saturday begins.

I end up calling an acquaintance of mine who I am only sort of interested in seeing, who lives an hour away. He is a 25 year old “author” and by author I mean “failed writer” and by failed writer I mean “college dropout who writes stuff once in a blue moon and then claims to be a writer”. He is irish, he is handsome, but he is also predatory and weird. I met him once, when I was 16, and he was 23, and he was visiting a friend of his, who happened to be the brother of a friend. It’s a whole thing, but he thought I was hot when I was 16, so that should have been a clue.

But it wasn’t enough of a clue. I invite him to hang out. He takes me to eggs. I am lonely. I give him my first ever blowjob that I have given anyone. He doesn’t reciprocate.

I then enter a nearly 4 year long on again/off again relationship with him where I see him once or twice a year, we have either good or bad sexual contact, at one point he does something without permission but I’m too sure that I imagined it to say anything. It involves years of emotional manipulation and is, to date, the most abusive situation I’ve ever been in, emotionally, as far as romance is concerned. I eventually cut him off, which is hard, because when he’s not being an emotionally abusive sometimes partner, I’ve actually come to truly love him as a friend. But enough is enough. And I cut him off. And I find out a few years later that about a year after that, he dies of a heroin overdose.

And to this day, I still think…well fuck, would the cost of a plane ticket home been THAT MUCH had I known?

And our winner winner turkey dinner, eeloise!

Senior year of high school, my dementia ridden grandfather thought Thanksgiving dinner was just starting (we had finished but the adults still were around the table talking and drinking) and tried to say the Lord’s Prayer as he pissed himself, destroying my mother’s sanity and a dining room chair. Simultaneously upstairs I lost my virginity to my MORMON boyfriend on a folding chair in our storage room.

That’s how you win Thanksgiving.

We laughed, we cried, it was better than Cats.

Well done, everyone. Now spill about your worst/most embarrassing holiday party experiences (it doesn’t have to be an office party, FYI). Mine will surely happen at the upcoming Gawker Media party when I ask every member of Deadspin to slow dance and get turned down by all of them.