I can't think of a "worst" Thanksgiving, but maybe this one would be memorable as one of the more boring or depressing ones.
Back in 94 I was single and had been unemployed a few months after being layed off from WordPerfect and was trying to start my own self employment.
I was living in Utah and decided to drive back to New Hampshire to visit some friends and hang out. I loaded up a few rifles and stuff and found someone at BYU who wanted to be a rider -- he was driving back to Connecticut for the Thanksgiving holiday -- and we took off on a non-stop cross country journey. We got to Connecticut Thursday, Thanksgiving morning, and I dropped him off at a meeting point he arranged with his family and went on to New Hampshire. I got there around noon and tried to find a restaurant that was open so I could "celebrate" the holiday. I found nothing. This was before smart phones etc so I had to just drive around trying to find the designated ones that were covering (I know around here you always get one or two open -- at least at that time you did -- seems now more are open on Thanksgiving). I spent the whole afternoon looking but found nothing.
My friend and his family, with whom I would be staying the couple weeks I was going to be in New England, had been invited out themselves to someone else's house for Thanksgiving so I was not able go with them as they were guests themselves. I finally showed up at their house later in the evening, still without having eaten more than car-snacks I had left from the trip. They fed me some supper and I did not tell them what time I had gotten to New Hampshire and what had happened. I didn't want them to feel bad.
A day or two later some friends from my hometown in Mass invited me for Sunday dinner where they repeated the traditional Thanksgiving meal using all their left overs, so I did get the meal associated with the holiday a few days later.
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We usually go to my parents house, or now my mom's hosue. This year she is out, at 81, galavanting around Egypt with my niece, her grand daughter. They left Monday via Paris. My sister, my niece's mom, is in Africa with her husband, who is a US Army reserve officer and currently the US Military Attache in one of the African countries near Libya and Egypt. My mom and niece met up with my sister and her sons (don't know if the oldest daughter who is in Mass at college went or not). So we won't be going to my mom's for Thanksgiving. She is not coming back until after the New Year. She'll be galavanting around Egypt and the country my BIL is attache in for a few weeks.
My sister up in Evanston invited us to go to their house for Thanksgiving. But my daughter has been sick with RSV (we suspect) and so we are not planning to go up there. We're not sure what we'll be doing but no one here wants to make the effort to make everything ourselves. It's gtoo late to order the (expensive) KFC turkey dinner and with my daughter sick we can't go to one of the restaurants that serve Thanksgiving around here. Don't know if we'll do Pizza, or steaks, or some rotisserie chicken from Costco or what. Have to go up and discuss it with my kids and when my wife gets home, her, to see what they want to do. She is off today but went out to do some stuff this morning. My vote is Pizza
. We can get a few Papa Murphy take and bake pizzas... I have a bunch of pies I bought to take to my sisters house and for us to have on the long weekend so we are set!
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The funniest Thanksgiving was back around 2000 or 2001. I was recently married and my wife and I were living in New Hampshire, where I had moved in Dec 97 to work at a Y2K startup. (I got married in 2000 as a late comapred to average age for marrying
). My brother and his family had come from Utah to work at the same startup so lived in a condo in the same city. The startup had failed by now and I was self employed and my brother was working somewhere but still lived there. So we planned to do Thanksgiving together. I was going to cook the turkey and stuff and they would bring a bunch of the rest. But my sister in law said she had a turkey so I didn't have to buy one. I went and picked up the "Turkey", which was frozen and wrapped in a large shopping bag and let it defrost. Thursday morning, when I went to get it ready to stick in the oven for the later afternoon dinner, I discovered it wasn't a turkey. It was a bunch of frozen chicken or turkey legs in a big mass that frozen, we the right size and approximate shape of a turkey.
I drove to Walmart (which unfortunately for the workers was open) and bought a frozen Turkey. By now it was 10 or so am. I got it home and tried to do a quick unthw using water bath etc. It partially unfroze and I roasted it in the oven. The outer inch of meat was cooked but the inner part was still frozen so we had to be careful in carving it but we did have the turkey for dinner with my brother and his family. I had made pan stuffing and some other stuff and they had all the potatoes and other stuff and it worked out in the end. I finished thawing and cooking it and we had lots of left over turkey.