My mom and dad always worked long hours, so I learned to cook very young, and was fairly confident in the kitchen, and was making full dinners for my family by the time I was 13. We are Italian-American, and when I was growing up, we always had a big Thanksgiving dinner, but neither my parents nor my brother liked turkey, so we skipped that whole traditional American food thing and had lots of Italian food instead, but we still honored the day, Know what I mean??
I got married young (22), and wanted to impress my in-laws when I was a newlywed, and decided I'd do Thanksgiving. I'd never cooked a turkey, but how hard could that be? Anyway, Thanksgiving morning, the turkey wasn't thawed out, it was like a rock (I bought it the day before), and I had this hulking frozen thing, like a piece of cement in my kitchen sink, and I didn't even know which end to stuff! I was hysterical and called my mom, who lived on the other side of Brooklyn, and didn't drive, so my dad drove her to our apt., and we had to thaw that thing, our arms were ice cold up to our elbows trying to remove chunks of ice, we accidentally left one of the giblets bags in the bird, mom left because I didn't want to seem incompetent to my in-laws, and the bird took forever - I should've put it in the oven very early in the AM.
Dinner was exhausting, I was in over my head, and my in-laws didn't suffer fools lightly. H's grandma angrily said she had to "fill up on cake!" God help me, I have stepped up my game since then!