For many years, my mother’s extended family celebrated Christmas–the eve and the day–at my great aunt Katie’s home because she had the longest and widest dining room. We put three large tables together so the entire family—kids included—could sit at the dinner table together. The Christmas tree, with everyone’s presents beneath it, occupied her living room. Before I tell you about one particular Christmas nightmare at Aunt Katie’s, I need to fill you in on the stars of this misadventure: my second cousins, the fraternal twins M and B.

When I was a little girl, my grandfather bought a large older summer home in a small town on Long Island. He invited several family members to spend the summer there. M and B were approaching three years old at the time. While their parents and everyone else, including the older kids and me, were unpacking and doing other chores, M and B got hold of the pieces of hardware needed to assemble their cribs, took them into the bathroom, and flushed them down the porcelain facility. Now you know what demonic spawns of Satan these little darlings happen to be.

At Christmas dinner that same year, while the rest of the family was enjoying a scrumptious dessert of Italian pastries, M and B managed to slip away without being noticed. We were clearing the table when their mom looked around and saw they were gone. She called out to them. Silence. Uh-Oh. Panicking, she shrieked, “Find them!”

We scattered to search. The kids and I ran outside to see if they sneaked out to play in the snow. That’s when we heard the mother of all primal screams that pierced the house’s windows, walls, and siding—the loudest Oh my God I’ve ever heard. The kids and I ran back inside to the sight of all the parents and elders huddled together in the entrance to the living room, hands pressed to their temples, jaws slackened, eyes widened in dismay. Did they find M and B? Were M and B hurt? We squeezed between them to see what it was that freaked them out. There they were on the floor in front of the Christmas tree, little M and B, in the midst of a blizzard of torn wrapping paper, ribbon, empty gift boxes, and the contents of all the empty gift boxes. The horror. We all played detective for the next hour trying to remember who bought what for whom. Not a very Merry Christmas. M and B went on everyone’s Naughty List.

My parents’ six-month-old Viszla puppy was a chowhound of the first order. If anyone left food within his reach, it disappeared into his bottomless pit of a stomach instantaneously. I was in Graduate School, still single, and still living at home when this after Christmas culinary nightmare occurred. A few days after Christmas, we gathered in my maternal grandparents’ apartment for a post Christmas dinner of leftovers—antipasto, ravioli, meatballs and sausage, salad, and the main course of leftover beef roast, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy. We polished off the first four courses and were ready for the roast. My dad went into the kitchen to carve it, only to discover his Viszla puppy standing on a kitchen chair, front paws on the kitchen table, muzzle in the gravy boat as he lapped up every last drop of gravy. Fortunately, according to Dad, the roast itself was just beyond the puppy’s reach. [I still have my suspicions.] Unfortunately, there was no gravy for the leftover roast and taters that night. Pass the ketchup, please.

There’s nothing worse than being sick at Christmas time. I know. I’ve been there. It’s a nightmare to be sure. Macho Guy and I knew we were all coming down with something gross the day we were supposed to drive to New York to spend Christmas with my mom. We called to beg off, but she wouldn’t hear of it. If we were sick when we got there, she said she’d take care of us. That year was her turn to host the four of us for Christmas, and she wasn’t about to forfeit her turn. We knew we’d never hear the end of it if we failed to show, so we bundled up in the car and headed north. Once we arrived, she tried to get us to eat dinner, but the mere thought of food…ugh. We all went straight to bed.

Mom was relentless. No flu virus was going to spoil her plans for Christmas. She had invited my two nephews to stay at her place while we were there so they would get to spend time with their cousins. We strongly advised against it. That advice fell on deaf ears. As a result, her apartment eventually bore a distinct resemblance to a hospital ward. Instead of caroling on Christmas Eve, her six patients were hurling. On Christmas Day, the rest of the family gathered in my grandparent’s apartment on the floor above while we six sickies were quarantined in Mom’s apartment below. Amazingly enough, Mom never caught the flu from us. I’m convinced the flu didn’t dare to spoil her Christmas by infecting her.

And then there was the time our American Eskimo devil dog committed Christmas sacrilege. While our family members slept all snug in their beds on Christmas Eve, that dastardly devil dog snatched Baby Jesus from the manger beneath the Christmas tree and gnawed his head off. We were aghast. There was a donkey, an ox, a sheep, and lambs in the manger surrounding Baby Jesus. Couldn’t devil dog have chewed one of them instead? Why Baby Jesus? And now what was to become of our headless Baby Jesus? We couldn’t very well toss him in the trash. Do we bury him? Cremate him? We had never faced a situation like that before. Then a frightening thought occurred to me. As devil dog’s owners, MG and I were responsible for his despicable behavior. I expected to be struck by a thunderbolt at any moment. So, would we receive divine punishment? Or would we be forgiven for the evil perpetrated by our devil dog? What would our fate be? I still dread the thought. Holy Christmas nightmare!

At the time, Macho Guy and I were still young marrieds living down South. His family drove down to spend Thanksgiving with the two of us, and they brought along a small cooler filled with pheasant breasts. The guys are all hunters and they bagged their limit. They proudly laid their bounty before us.

Early Thanksgiving morning, I got the turkey out of the refrigerator and discovered it had hardly thawed. I hadn’t taken it out of the freezer soon enough. I panicked. We would not have turkey for Thanksgiving. No drumsticks. No wishbone. No stuffing. I was a dead woman.

Luckily for me, my mother-in-law came up with a positively brilliant idea. Let’s use the pheasant breasts instead. Hey, it sure sounded brilliant to me. The pheasant breasts weren’t frozen. Done deal!

My mother-in-law said that at home she usually just dredged the pheasant breasts in flour and fried them. That didn’t sound very Thanksgivingish to either of us, so we cracked open one of my cookbooks [Betty Crocker’s New Dinner for Two Cookbook that I bought as a newlywed] to find something more festive.

On page 39, we found Pheasant en Crème. Oh, yes. So sophisticated. So chic. So ‘veddy’ upper class. The sides that went with it looked easy enough to prepare too. We looked at each other and grinned. We two adventurous chefs were about to impress the socks off our family.

We checked the list of ingredients. The recipe called for a whole pheasant. We figured we had enough pheasant breasts to make a whole bird. Check. I had salt, onion, and garlic cloves. Check, check, check. Uh-Oh. My pantry failed to yield Cream of Chicken Soup, apple cider, Worcestershire sauce, and mushrooms. The stores were closed. Hmmm. What to do? Substitution, of course. That was definitely the way to go.

Let’s see. I did have Cream of Mushroom soup, so we could substitute that for the Cream of Chicken Soup and the mushrooms—took care of two ingredients with one can. I didn’t have apple cider, but I had apple cider vinegar. Close enough. Now Worcestershire sauce, well that one was a toughie. Wait a minute. I had a huge bottle of Soy Sauce. Doesn’t that taste a lot like Worcestershire sauce? Sure it does. What the heck, it would have to do.

We both agreed we had everything covered. But, to ease the niggling doubts lurking in the backs of our minds, we got out the plain old unsophisticated ham that I planned to serve for dinner on Friday and stuck it in the oven along with our bastardized Pheasant en Crème dish.

We set an extravagant table. We used the good matching glasses. No cartoon character jelly jar glasses for us. We used the matching stainless flatware and good everyday dinnerware instead of Macho Guy’s mismatched, scratched and faded Melmac dishes from his college days. We even used cloth napkins instead of paper, and we left the centerpiece on the dining room table even though we couldn’t see each other over the humongous arrangement. Yes, we went all out.

At dinnertime, we proudly carried our culinary masterpiece to the table to smiles and applause. We said grace, and I silently added a prayer that none of us would die of food poisoning if the Pheasant en Crème turned out not to be as festive as my mother-in-law and I hoped. We began serving, passing the plates around, and then everyone prepared to begin their gourmet dining experience.

I think I was the first to take a bite. I put that first forkful in my mouth and my taste buds immediately begged for mercy. I actually believe I heard them scream at me.

Spit it out, spit it out, spit it out! Now, now, now! Don’t swallow, don’t swallow, whatever the hell you do, don’t swallow!!!

Oh. My. God. This must be what poison tastes like. I peeked around the humongous centerpiece to see my mother-in-law’s expression of horror as she began turning green. She did what my taste buds were urging me to do. She grabbed her napkin and spit the noxious concoction into it. I did likewise. At almost the exact moment, we both shouted at everyone, “Don’t eat it! Don’t eat it! It’s awful!”

We were much too kind to ourselves. Awful did not begin to cover the ground. Gosh-awful did not begin to cover the ground. Freaking Gosh-awful did not begin to cover the ground. There were no awful words in the dictionary that were awful enough to describe how awful our awful Frankensteined Pheasant en Crud dish tasted.

I snatched up the serving platter at once. My mother-in-law desperately started snatching dinner plates away from everyone and slapping their forks out of their hands, but not before Macho Guy and his dad decided to see what the shouting was about. They were fool enough to swallow chunks of the toxic bird and both gagged. They reached for their water glasses and drained them. My father-in-law then rubbed salt into the already gaping wound. He said, “What a waste of good pheasant.”

Humiliated beyond belief, my mother-in-law and I retreated to the kitchen in abject failure. We dumped the contents of the platter and the plates down the garbage disposal where that slop found kindred spirits.

Thankfully, we had the good old solid dependable ham. We brought it out to everyone’s vast relief, and Macho Guy sliced it and served it. Everyone tasted it. Everyone chewed it. Everyone swallowed it. No one spit it out. At last, my mother-in-law and I had something to be thankful for.

Macho Guy’s older sister and her husband had been delayed and arrived when the rest of us had just about finished eating. The others regaled them with a grossly exaggerated tale of the lethal culinary disaster my mother-in-law and I had prepared, claiming we tried to poison everyone so we could collect their life insurance benefits. Ha-Ha. Very funny.

Well, this particular brother-in-law of Macho’s was widely known for his cast iron stomach. He asked if we had any of the pheasant left. We did. There was quite a lot left in the baking pan that we hadn’t yet consigned to the garbage disposal. He said he’d like to try it. Everyone did his best to dissuade him, but he was insistent.

I brought out the baking pan containing the remains of the infamous Pheasant en Crap. Macho’s brother-in-law encouraged me to pile a huge portion on his plate, and then he dug in with gusto. The rest of us waited for the inevitable gagging and probable puking. Instead, he pronounced it delicious and asked for seconds. And thirds. We all watched dumbstruck as he chowed down. Not only did he have a cast iron stomach, he also had cast iron taste buds.

My mother-in-law and I never lived down that we prepared the most absolutely terrible, horrible, inedible, worst thanksgiving dinner ever. We heard about it every Thanksgiving thereafter, ad infinitum. We were not alone in our infamy, however. Macho’s brother-in-law never lived down that he ate that incredibly inedible bird without gagging or puking, that he enjoyed it so much that he asked for seconds and thirds, and then he lived to tell about it. Thus memorable family legends are born.

I wish you all a Thanksgiving that is happy and nothing like the disaster I just described.