I woke up at approximately 6:00 a.m. to put my turkeys in for approx. 30 guests. I was in the kitchen preparing the turkeys, when I heard this running back and forth above my head. We had wooden beams at that time in our kitchen. We finally figured out it must be a mouse that had somehow gotten in one of the beams. UCK! but the dinner must go on. I prepared my two turkeys and but them in the oven. While they were cooking, I went back to do my dishes. I loaded the dishwasher, turned it on, and it immediately backed up all over my kitchen. It was a mess and anything that I put in the garbage disposal backed up as well.

I checked the turkeys about two hours later. My oven was not hot! The thermostat had gone out. We immediately transported them for cooking to my sister’s house - a mile away. She was out helping feed the homeless so I had to stay at her house to check them.

My husband somehow managed to unclog our sink, and after all that - our Thanksgiving dinner was delicious. The mouse? We never got him!!

I have a crippling phobia of bones. The sight of chicken wings or ribs being eaten provokes immediate spontaneous vomit. This limits my patronage at many casual restaurants and prevents my attendance at all backyard barbeques. I have a less severe but still robust phobia of foods touching one another on a plate, mine or anyone else’s.

Sadly, I was born on Thanksgiving, a holiday which highlights the customs of oohing and ahhing over butchering a turkey carcass and gorging ourselves with oozy, overlapping foods. Not unlike the Christmas babies whose relatives think it’s perfectly acceptable to give one present for birthday and Christmas (it SO isn’t), I HATE HATE HATE when my family combos my birthday with Thanksgiving. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do LESS than celebrate my birthday while attempting implosion therapy.

After years of begging my parents to dismiss me from birthday/Thanksgiving altogether and being denied, I think I was about nine when I devised this plan: While the turkey was cooling and everyone was playing games or watching football, I inched the turkey to the very edge of the counter and silently encouraged the SIX DOGS (visiting and our own) to jump up, grab the turkey and devour it before anyone knew what was happening.

It was rotten of me, and the dogs did get in trouble, but it’s been my Thanksgiving secret for 19 years.

I have never personally had a disaster but I have experienced the classic “grandma dropping the turkey on the floor” followed by a litany of catholic influenced curses!

My worst Thanksgiving nightmare happened about 10 years ago. We had invited my husbands sisters & their families from Oklahoma to join us at our ranch in southern missouri. My husband thought it would be great to smoke the turkey rather than roast it in the oven. So the evening before Thanksgiving he loaded it into the smoker so that it would be ready for a mid day dinner. Thanksgiving morning he went out to check on the turkey and shortly came back into the house with a look on his face that plainly said something was wrong. He said you had better come and look at the turkey so out I went to the smoker. There in front of me sat a charred black turkey, every inch of skin burned to black ash. He thought we could salvage it by just washing off the ashes. I was mortified and couldn’t even imagine serving that black thing to our guests. So I did an emergency thaw of the extra turkey I had in the freezer and we had a fashionably late dinner with a perfectly roasted turkey and yes we did wash the ashes off the charred turkey and believe it or not it tasted ok. Needless to say we never smoked a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner again.