Are you dreading Thanksgiving, or crossing off the days until its arrival? Maybe you’re excited to go home for your family’s annual dinner and delicious food, or maybe you’re contemplating fleeing the country to avoid seeing certain family members. You might not celebrate Thanksgiving at all. But no matter your current Thanksgiving situation, Her Campus has complied a collection of funny or embarrassing Thanksgiving stories from collegiettes to make you feel better about confronting that turkey!
“One year my family had put the Thanksgiving turkey in the fridge downstairs. This was a new house and our first Thanksgiving in it. Me and my friend really wanted to watch Shrek 2, but there were no open sockets for the TV so we just mindlessly unplugged everything… along with the fridge. So everything including our family Thanksgiving turkey rotted, all because me and my friend wanted to watch Shrek 2.”
-Maddie, Central Washington University
“I’m half Chinese and most Thanksgivings are spent with my Chinese side of the family, so stuff like fried rice and chow mein and other dishes always end up on our table. Usually my other relatives will bring it but that year, my mom had wanted to make noodles. And she’d just gotten some fancy new cooking appliance so she was adamant about showing it off instead of cooking noodles like a regular person. So my mom puts it in there and proceeds to ignore it for 20 or so minutes while the rest of us are busy in the kitchen.
At the 20 some minute mark, I look over and see the noodles are BONE DRY, and I tell my mom. At this point, they have the same consistency as the noodles you put on top salads – and definitely not a noodle dish. My mom takes the noodles out, and puts another batch in saying, “Oh, it’s because I didn’t take it out fast enough. I’ll watch it this time.” Not only does the same exact thing happen, my mother PLATES BOTH DRY NOODLES, AND SERVES THEM ANYWAYS. As you can predict, they were horrible and no one ate them.”
-Mandy, California Polytechnic State University
“My family runs on Hispanic time, so one Thanksgiving we said dinner was going to start at ten. We waited…and waited…and waited. Everyone in my family ended up getting there at 1 a.m. and since it was a potluck we couldn’t start eating without them. We ended up celebrating Thanksgiving at 2 a.m. It wasn’t the first time, either!”
-Lia, Boston University
“I was maybe 14, and I had discovered that cooking and baking was totally my forte. You just follow the instructions! Anyway, my parents had a meeting, and they instructed me to make bran muffins for Thanksgiving. The muffins that have carrots and raisins and actual bran. They’re delicious. Anyway, I go about the gathering of the flour and sugar and oil and such, and then I see the recipe calls for powdered milk. So I climb up to a tall shelf and pull down a green water bottle my dad had filled with powdered milk a few weeks ago. I’d seen him make milk with it, so it was clearly powdered milk.
I mix everything together, and realize I forgot to preheat the oven. Oh well. But when I went back about 5 minutes later to see if the oven was ready (it wasn’t). I noticed the batter had risen. It was fluffy and had risen. I beat it down with a spoon and left. I beat it down a couple more times. I eventually got my muffins in the oven, and when I pulled them out, they looked weird. They didn’t have the pleasing muffin tops and it looked like someone had sprinkled flour on the top of all of them, since there was this weird spotty white residue. I was a confused human, and presented them to my mom when she got home. She was also confused. I took a bite, and almost puked it was so bad. We waited for my dad, and when I told him not to eat the thing because ew, he took a bite then he spat it out. They asked what I used for powdered milk. I showed them.
Turns out it was Oxy-Clean. The fam still remembers.”
-Alex, University of Iowa
“Last Thanksgiving I got so drunk in front of all my relatives that I knocked over a glass of wine all over the table.”
-Nicole, Brown University
“I was fifteen and at my first Thanksgiving with my dad, his new girlfriend, her son, my brother and my cousin, and since my parents had divorced only a year and a half ago I was definitely not in the holiday spirit. My dad noticed and tried to make jokes to make me feel better and make me come out of my shell, but his plan ended up working a little too well. I don’t remember the exact joke, but when he said something about “eating the turkey butt” I burst out laughing. The thing is, he said the joke at the exact same time I was taking a huge swig of water, so I ended up spitting what looked like 50 gallons of water right into my plate. My bare turkey leg was swimming in my backwashed water. I couldn’t stop laughing but I was completely mortified.”
-Nicole, Boston University
“It didn’t happen to me, but one Thanksgiving my cousin got so drunk that he started his own karaoke session and drooling all over the floor while he sang. We were laughing at his performance until he got the drunchies and tried to eat the microphone…”
-Anonymous, Northeastern University
“I’m forced to go to my aunt’s house for Thanksgiving every year. My aunt has four cats and four Great Danes, and they’re allowed to run all over the house. We were sitting at the table for dinner when I felt something nudge my foot. I was confused for a second until I felt something wet along my leg and then a sudden sharp pain that hurt so much I screamed right in the middle of the dinner, startling everyone around me. It was one of the Great Danes licking gravy off my leg that got upset it wasn’t a turkey leg and decided to bite me. I’m never going back to that house again.”
-Abby, University of Florida
“About three years ago, my family didn’t know I was gay, and I had just started dating this girl who went to a college out of state. I found out that she wouldn’t be able to go home for Thanksgiving so I called my gramma, the matriarch of the family, and asked if my ‘friend’ could come for Thanksgiving. She said oh of course, no one should be alone for the holidays. So I spent Thanksgiving tensing every time my girlfriend was referred to as ‘Cam’s little girlfriend’ because that’s just how she talks, and listening to my family try and ask my girlfriend about her college life and whether she was dating anyone or not. Bonus: The air mattress that my girlfriend was given to sleep on mysteriously had a hole in it that made it deflate through the night so whoops, she had to sleep in my bed.”
-Cam, Georgia State University