The following story is by a local contributor for Hoptown Chronicle’s 2026 Holiday Humor series, which highlights the lighter side of life with family and friends from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
The vast majority of Thanksgivings in my life have been entirely ordinary. Turkey, dressing, pumpkin pie. Table it for a year. Repeat.
So when Thanksgiving of 2013 reared its grotesque head, I was naive and wholly unprepared. From the Trojan turkey to the most bizarre of desserts, Thanksgiving season 2013 dished up something not soon to be forgotten and, let’s hope, never to be repeated!
This parade of calamity started a week before Thanksgiving. At the time, I was an ex-graduate student living with my parents in South Carolina. I made a trip to Nashville to visit my friend Christine, who had managed to get a real job in our field, something of a feat. She worked at the Tennessee State Historical Commission and invited me to crash her office’s Thanksgiving party.
The Tennessee State Historical Commission is headquartered at Clover Bottom, an Italianate mansion in a deceptively rural setting, for it’s very close to Nashville. The inside has been converted into office space, with a light touch. The Thanksgiving potluck took place around lunchtime, in the second-floor meeting area.
Lewis, who remains a stranger yet looms large in my memory, was in charge of the turkey. Unfortunately, Lewis had come down with Norovirus. A co-worker picked up the smoked turkey and brought it to the potluck, along with Lewis’s apologies for being absent. As you may suspect, Lewis’s turkey was a Trojan horse.
I started to feel queasy the next morning. I chalked it up to the after-effects of consuming hot chicken and milk the night before and an early drive back to South Carolina. That evening, Norovirus hit me like a ton of bricks in my mom’s brand-new car. The virus raged for the next three days.
But by Tuesday, I felt well enough to think about Thanksgiving dinner. Pumpkin pie only appears on my family’s table one time a year. This thought spurred me on, and I strong-armed my body into a rapid recovery.
Thanksgiving Day dawned golden. I hadn’t eaten a real meal in days, and it looked like Thanksgiving dinner would be my foray back into regular food. My parents and I loaded into the car and drove over to my grandparents’ house. Thanksgiving 2013 happened to be their 60th wedding anniversary, so my mom’s sisters and their families trekked down from the northeast to join the party. It was a rather big deal. My grandpa even hired a photographer to document the gathering.
Because the group was so large, the different family parties had divvied up meal duties. This had happened off-stage, and Dessert, the crown jewel of Thanksgiving dinner, had fallen entirely to my Aunt Janet and her daughters. This was when Thanksgiving 2013 revealed that it was not an ordinary monster, but a many-headed hydra, intent on utter desolation.
I peeped at the desserts lined up on the counter and immediately sensed something was very wrong. Where was the pumpkin pie? I frantically peeled back tin foil and wrangled silicon lids, but to no avail. Upon interrogation, I learned that my aunt doesn’t even like pumpkin. And neither do my three cousins! It seemed to me that before assigning the leading lady role of Thanksgiving Dessert, someone should have asked this question in the interview!
My aunt saw grape granola a fitting replacement for pumpkin pie. If you’re reeling, so was I. But the silver lining sat demurely beside it. A pecan pie, beaming with a sort of familiar comfort, cast its glow across the counter. I felt mollified for a moment, but this was fleeting. This pie proved to be the second Trojan horse of Thanksgiving 2013.
“You made a pecan pie,” I stated to my cousin. I was sure I should be suspicious. She had always lived in New York and this seemed outside her normal culinary interests. But the other, more conciliatory side of my brain tuned in, reminding me that pecan pie is very easy to make. And she was in culinary school, so surely, she could handle it. “Aha! But culinary school? Too fancy for pecan pie!” replied the critical side of my brain, and I decided there was something to this.
My cousin busily threw something into the oven with one hand and simultaneously wiped the counter clean with the other before off-handedly replying, “Yes—it’s a tofu pecan pie.”
Up leered another head of the hydra! I dropped my head and admitted defeat. Mark Thanksgiving 2013 in the books as a total loss.
Grace Abernethy is a historic preservationist and artist who specializes in caring for and recreating historic architectural finishes. She earned her Master of Science in Historic Preservation from Clemson University in 2011 and has worked on historic buildings throughout the eastern United States. Abernethy was a recipient of the South Carolina Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation Award in 2014 and won 2nd place in the Charles E. Peterson Prize for the Historic American Buildings Survey in 2011. She and her husband, Brendan, moved to Hopkinsville from Nashville in 2020. She works as an independent contractor and is a board member of the Hopkinsville History Foundation.
