The Worst Christmas Dinners

In theory Christmas is amazing: food, drinks, nice weather, and a few days off. But in reality spending an extended amount of time with your family while getting plowed and probably sunburnt can be a cocktail of bad times. So before everyone heads off into their own culinary abyss, we thought we'd reflect on some of the worst Christmas dinners. Come 26 December you won't be able to say we didn't warn you.

VERY SPECIAL PRAWNS

In my family, food poisoning is always my mother's fault. She grew up in small town coastal South Africa in the 50s and believes that use-by-dates were invented to make people fussy. But for once, this family food disaster wasn't her doing. Like a lot of Australian families, every Christmas eve we have seafood. On this particular year my brother-in-law had wrangled a new hook up—he always had sweet hook ups—in the form of a three kilo bag of budget prawns. We were all stoked.

This next part would only come out later, but apparently he forgot to defrost them in the fridge overnight, so on Christmas eve morning left them in a bucket of lukewarm water in the sink for a few hours. My sister swear that she tried to stop him, but she always hated seafood so presumably didn't try too hard.

Any way the day proceeded as usual, everyone sweated their way through my mum's speciality of over cooked seafood covered in garlic margarine and generally had a good time. That was until my brother started to feel sick, then my dad, and finally my brother-in-law. You know that scene in Bridesmaids when everyone simultaneously needs to expel all their bodily liquids? It was like that, but everyone did good in their past lives so it was at least just vomit.

The rest of the day was spent with the men in my family vomiting in the toilet, sink, and backyard as the women gloated over the fact our gender was above a round of Russian Seafood Roulette. We would probably have been mad at the prawn dealer, except he probably ate a kilo of the little guys himself and burst a blood vessel in his eye from puking. It's hard to tell someone they ruined Christmas while they're hunched over the toilet crying blood.

A RED CHRISTMAS

The following story takes place when I was 13, which is already a bit of a spoiler alert. My whole family was sitting around the table tucking into dinner—parents, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents—I'd been feeling unwell all day so was huddled in the corner. Everyone was having a great time but had awful stomach pains, my legs ached, and I felt so nauseous I could barely eat. Then I remember thinking, wait did I just pee my pants?

I slowly stood up, figuring everyone was distracted and wouldn't notice if I quietly slipped off to the bathroom to check what the hell was going on. As soon as I got in and pulled down my pants it because horribly clear I'd just got my first period on Christmas day. Up till that point it was just a shitty experience, but it was about to become a full on trauma.

While standing in the bathroom, trying to work out how much toilet paper was the normal to deal with a situation like this I heard my mum call through the door asking if I was okay. Then I heard my grandma's voice, and then a few aunts chattering in the background. Turns out I wasn't as discreet as I thought, and the massive blood mark on my jeans gave me away as I casually sauntered out the room.

THE WORST CHRISTMAS GUEST

At one point I had the unfortunate experience of my token "crazy" friend briefly being my boss. That brought its own complications, but it was never more of an issue than when my family invited her to spend Christmas with us. She was American and didn't have much of a support network in Australia, so it seemed like the festive thing to do. I lay down the ground rules: keep your crazy in check, don't bring booze, and don't expect them because it was a sober Christmas on account of a few family members recently committing themselves to AA. Oh, and bring dinner rolls.

I wasn't too worried, she was difficult but they were hardly tough prerequisites. Christmas day rolled around and so did she, dressed in a super sexy low cut mini dress and holding a bottle of wine. I didn't know who she expected to pick up, but no one really appreciated the bottle of contraband. She didn't let our uncomfortable silence stop her though and proceeded to help herself to my parent's cabinet of vintage wines and give my Christian, newly sober, mentally unwell aunt's new boyfriend a lap dance. That was already a lot for my fragile aunt to deal with before she began undoing her dress and writhing around in her bra.

Luckily my aunt isn't the jealous type and conveniently spent some time as a stripper so handled the whole thing pretty graciously. Eventually I had enough and sent her to bed with an oversized t-shirt in an attempt to bring the whole evening back to a PG rating. Moments after I returned to what was left of my family dinner she ran back in with the t-shirt refashioned as a mini skirt and started telling everyone how she was also a fashion designer. Once again I attempted to march her to bed like a naughty child, but she kept breaking free to run screaming back to the "party" and try to neck more of my parent's expensive wine. The upside of things was she passed out pretty early on account of all the excitement and we were able to finish what was left of Christmas with her snoring softly on the couch.

THE NUT ROASTER

I don't know if this is the worst Christmas, but it was probably the weirdest. My mum is all about the schemes: money making, attention getting, fire starting—she loves them all. This particular Christmas day we woke up to the sound of scraping and pulling in the back yard, she told us she had a surprise. We walked outside to see two massive drag marks ripped through the lawn from the side gate, across our nice hang out area, and around the side of the house. Following them we saw the object that would forever live in infamy in our family stories—the nut roaster.

Assuming you have no idea what I'm talking about, a nut roaster is a giant square metal chute about the size of a car park with an open bottom. In its natural environment it's where nuts pour through on their way to be roasted. In our garden she said she was going to be a hot tub.

Being totally open on the bottom, not connected to a water or power source, or with anyway to get in or out didn't bother her. She said she'd get someone in to weld the bottom closed and we could fill it by running a hose through the laundry window. To get in and out we'd have to use a rope or something similar but we could handle it. That left heating.

She suggested that we start a fire underneath and take turns stoking and controlling it as the others relaxed in the water trying not to be boiled alive. We pointed out she was literally describing a cauldron. The rest of the day was spent arguing about how it clearly wouldn't work: best case scenario no handyman would help her, worst case she cooks us alive.

THE ITALIAN JOB

A few Christmases ago I decided I'd take the leap and spend the holiday with my boyfriend's family. They're Italian and everything an Italian cliche is—big, loud, and seemingly always angry. They liked to call it "passionate". But lets just say it was a big contrast from my incredibly vanilla family traditions that centred around trifle and bon-bons.

When he mentioned I was a vegetarian the family reacted like he'd said I had a history of public nudity. His grandmother even made a comment about it effecting my fertility. But things picked up after that, and I thought it was going pretty well by the time his nonna served me up her piece de resistance—spaghetti a la napolitana.

I politely ate it, too nervous to point out that it tasted kind of weird. Eventually I worked my way to the bottom of the bowl for the sake of being a good guest. When I finished I looked up to see nonna gleefully peering down at me. "See you like! You eat the meat!" she exclaimed.

Turns out she slipped finely chopped mince in it in what I hope was a well meaning attempt to nourish me, not a malicious attempt to trick me into breaking my vegetable vows. Either way I still spent the rest of the afternoon dry heaving in my boyfriend's parent's bathroom.

DON'T EAT THE SALAD

My grandmother is a legendarily bad cook. On top of that, her frugal ways mean she buys most meat and produce just before it goes off, and then freezes, defrosts, and re-freezes it a couple of times before it's transformed into a meal. As a result, most members of our extended family have suffered food poisoning from one of her meals at one point in their lives. It's become a bit of a family in joke.

One Christmas my parents and my aunt and uncle decided to rent serviced holiday apartments in the same building on the coast, just down the road from my Nan's, and have Christmas there with the rest of the family. This meant that we'd hopefully escape Nan's cooking. While most of the food was fine, Nan turned up with some brown slimy meat dish and a salad containing aspic (meat jelly), canned beetroot, herrings, potato, and some sort of creamy dressing. It looked as disgusting as it sounds, and unfortunately Nan guilted me into eating it, much to the glee of my siblings and cousins.

Six hours later, on the way to my car, I was overcome with nausea and power-spewed in the basement car-park of the building. Nan's cooking had struck again. I didn't want the staff of the hotel to clean up my vomit, but I couldn't see a hose anywhere so I went and found a couple of buckets in the apartment. I filled them up, went back to the basement and started cleaning as best I could when my mum came down and saw what was happening.

Rather than accepting the obvious facts of the situation—Nan gave me food poisoning and I was cleaning up the resulting vomit—she decided that I had purposely vomited the medication I take for bipolar disorder and was having a manic episode. I tried to calmly explain I just ate a salad with aspic in in, but she wasn't having any of it. She proceeded to cause a scene that wouldn't be out of place in the Bold and the Beautiful and then dragged me home and locked me in my bedroom in an attempt to calm me down. Again, I tried to explain I was calm, I just felt terrible.

As if it wasn't awkward enough she then threw my 14-year-old brother in the room with me and told him he was on "suicide watch" and if I killed myself it was his fault. I spent the rest of the night trying to comfort my traumatised kid brother and explain that I wasn't going to kill myself if he fell asleep while riding out the effects of Nan's herring salad.

Illustrations by Carla Uriarte