Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Anonymous. I'm... And I'm joined by Lily Padman.
Hi.
It's that time of year. The seasons are upon us.
It's holiday time.
It's the holidays. I love the holidays, Monica. Me too. Me too.
It makes me feel very, very dusty.
I feel bad for Bah Humbuggers. A, I'm sad that they're missing out on the joy I have. But then additionally, can you imagine if you didn't like it and then everyone around you loved it? That would really compound it.
That'd be hard.
It'd be really hard. But that's not us, luckily. We love it. No, we love it. Yeah. Of course, for this holiday of giving thanks, we have Thanksgiving disasters. Thanksgiving's always good for some disasters, and we have them today. Please enjoy Thanksgiving disasters.
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Chapter 2: What Thanksgiving disasters are shared in this episode?
Okay, so you have a Thanksgiving disaster store, or just Thanksgiving. I don't know if it'll be a disaster.
It's a disaster.
Oh, okay, great. You could have won the lottery on Thanksgiving. I guess that'd be worthy of a... That's a story.
That would have been a preferable story to this one.
Oh, great.
So I grew up in the Midwest, and I have a very big family. So this story takes place about 20 years ago. And my dad is one of 12, and eight of them are girls. Lots of us. Yeah. So because of this, our holidays were always crazy, chaotic.
Yeah, what do you guys rent an arena to have a Thanksgiving? How the fuck do you accommodate this many people?
Sometimes we would try to like break off into groups, but that always had its own drama of who was going where and when. So about 20 years ago, my aunt, I'm going to call her my Aunt Sally, is newly married and had just bought her first big girl house. So she wanted to host Thanksgiving. And this was a typical 90s house.
So there's carpet everywhere, white carpet, including in the dining room and the living room and pretty much everywhere besides the kitchen and the bathroom. So there's just white carpeting on the floor.
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Chapter 3: How did a Thanksgiving dinner turn chaotic?
Oh, boy.
We ended up leaving. We got pizza on the way home. And my Aunt Sally's marriage did not last for more than two years.
Oh, well, that's a big family to take on.
Wait, was it Aunt Sally's husband? Oh, no, no, no.
Oh, no. It's her terrible family. And this guy's like, I'm out.
Her brother. That sucks. He ruined a marriage along with the Thanksgiving.
Did he get sober at some point?
Yes. sober now. This was 20 years ago. It took probably about 10 more years to get there. OK, good for him.
And so my follow up question is, did people receive an amends for this Thanksgiving disaster? To your knowledge, did anyone get a phone call like, hey, I'm doing my ninth step?
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Chapter 4: What happened when Uncle Eddie had too much to drink?
And I thought in my head, because there's this pressure of hosting, oh, we're going to need this because we got to keep the sides warm. Not thinking the sides are already going to be warm, like you're cooking them in that moment. And then everybody's just eating. There's not this like big break.
I stand by your plan. I don't think it was crazy.
Yeah, that helps me a little bit. So I had planned, you know, the meats over here, the sides are over here. There's a whole flow to it that I've not really told anybody, which is like most of how life goes. And one of my husband's arguments is, you know, I've got this plan and I've never told him the plan and he just has to follow the plan. And so in my head, meat's here, side's here.
So I was like, oh, Drew, we need to set up my heating pad over here. And he's, you know, buzzers going off, got to get the turkey from outside, got to get the ham from the oven. He's moving around and I'm like, I need you to set up this tray really quick right here. He just put it somewhere and I was like, oh, that's not where I meant for it to be.
But he had just pulled the ham out of the oven and he had sat it on the counter immediately because, you know, it's super hot and just like really heavy. He sat it immediately down and I'm like, that's not where the ham goes. That's where my heating pad is.
sure sure those pans are like ikea furniture he starts moving it around it's gonna like taco and all the shit's gonna leak out he can't be moving it a lot it's probably got two moves in it really true that was his exact argument he was like well he can't move it like it's already been a little bit it's home He's like, this is where it's staying.
And I'm like, well, I don't know what to tell you. We got to move it. Aesthetics are key on Thanksgiving. I'm a Virgo like you, Monica. So I was like, the flow has to be right. For our family who's eaten with us hundreds of times.
The impression's over.
My in-laws were there. I didn't have to impress them. I'm already married. Like, I don't know what I was doing. I was like, Drew, you just have to move it. So he's like, fine. He picks it up. It immediately buckles. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Gallons of hot juice on him. Oh, fuck. It's scalding hot because he had just pulled it out of the oven. Oh, shit.
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Chapter 5: How did a family gathering lead to unexpected chaos?
And it's just a click away.
So easy. Yeah, they really figured it out. Was the ham salvageable? Do we eat the ham?
It was. Some had to get shaved. The parts that hit the floor got a little cut off. But, you know, the rest of it made it. Yum.
And then my second question is, here's the tricky thing about the juice in that tray. At first, quite slippery. But I'm imagining after you toweled it all up, now it's sticky sitting in there.
Yeah. I mean, it was days of our house smelling like ham and just days of being sticky.
You got to get like an industrial degreaser probably to cut through that.
We cleaned it, but like every day for like two weeks and we were still finding areas that needed it.
Yeah. Maybe the move would have been to throw a whole bag of kitty litter down on the ground, like an oil spill for a car and then sweep it up.
Because did it have some sort of like brown sugar glaze on it or something? Yeah. Yum.
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Chapter 6: What challenges arise when hosting Thanksgiving for a large family?
And has been for hours. What are they using?
Socks. Anything they get their hands on.
We've got the Tushy set up. So the Tushy is working overtime.
This sponsor is brought to you by Tushy.
I'm running downstairs to the grocery store to get some more toilet paper. We're handling it. So we spun back Friday. Everybody is down for the count. The thing I have left out is my mom and her parents, before they came to see me, had gone on a little soul-searching journey through the desert. My grandpa had worked as a doctor in Arizona during Vietnam.
They had decided that they were going to go back to where my mom was born. During this experience, they're knocking on strangers' doors to see if they can find these people that he knew where he lived. So they're exposing themselves to a lot of germs. The three of them were patient zero, right? We got grandma, we got mom. That's where it started. So that's my best guess.
So Friday, I'm still good. I think I'm good. Saturday, we've got planned. We're going to go to the zoo.
Good luck.
So we're going to have a big event at the zoo.
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