Mackenzie Hughes ’25

The person who wrote this article

 No one had as bad a Thanksgiving as Mike. Poor, poor Mike, whose girlfriend brought him to her house for the holiday. It went as terribly as you can expect a dinner between a white-collar wall street bro and his girlfriend’s hippie family can go. If only the youngest cousin throwing up her candied yam on her dinner plate because her dad said she couldn’t have any dessert if she didn’t finish it was the worst of it. The couple arrived around 2:00 pm, just in time for the uncles to be too concerned about football to ask when the last time her oil was changed and her aunts too worried about the popovers deflating to ask when they’ll get engaged. Immediately, Mike breaks one of their grandmother’s antique dining chairs. All he wanted to do was get a better view of the younger cousins’ intense game of spoons. Unfortunately, he was exiled to the backyard to manually rotate the turkey on the grill since a part had broken. He passed the time by thinking of how he could be spending the day on a beach with his own family, enjoying the company of crabs and jellyfish. This was not the first time he met the family, but the first time he met them under the circumstances of the Cowboys vs. the Giants and the aftermath of Winston, the French bulldog, winning the National Dog Show. Like every other communist family, his girlfriend’s aunts place bets on which group will win, and there was shared outrage when the sporting group didn’t claim its prize. So already, the conditions were not good to begin with. 

   All the forces of nature were convening against him, and a flock of wild boars came through the backyard. Mike took this opportunity to perform the extraordinary feat of scaling the roof, as any heroic figure would. Only Mike would be cursed enough to witness the grandmother getting a sponge bath – I guess she needed to calm down after her chair broke. By the time he returned, the turkey was fried, and he seriously considered DoorDashing chicken tenders. Luckily the attention was drawn away from this since the family’s free-range rabbit had knawed through the wiring of their elderly uncle’s chair lift, causing him to take a tumble down the stairs. Fortunately, Mike broke his fall. It’s ok, he can still move his wrist to text his fantasy football league group chat. Where is his girlfriend while all of this is going on? She’s busy putting out the flames on the dining room table after the pinecone pumpkin centerpieces made contact with a lit vanilla coconut candle. Believe it or not, the fire department showed up. And if you believed that, you certainly wouldn’t believe that the firewoman is none other than Mike’s ex-girlfriend Patricia. Of course, this is terribly awkward, not even considering he can’t lift his head because it hurts so much after being trucked by that 70-year-old uncle. Mike couldn’t even lie down and take a reprieve from all this madness, as the air mattress the family brought out for him had a hole in it and couldn’t stay inflated. He will awake the next morning with back pain, as he has never experienced before. Not only is Mike suffering physically, but he is also ailing mentally, as he learned through overheard dinner talk after the firemen left and the mother saved the burnt turkey and the uncle got an ice pack for his shoulder, and the other uncle turned the football off, and the grandmother consoled herself from the loss of her chair, that the bowl they used to mix the pie batter in was also used as what they referred to as the “throw up bowl” growing up. Yep, they’re one of those families. Needless to say, Mike will spend his next Thanksgiving somewhere in the Florida Keys, single.

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