Happy Horror-Days: Our Weirdest, Saddest and Craziest Holiday Memories

Holiday Break-In

I should note that others involved in this story dispute that a) it happened on Thanksgiving and b) it happened exactly in this way. It is precisely that kind of coordinated family effort that produced the mishap herein.

At Thanksgiving — I repeat: Thanksgiving — about 15 years ago, my brother and I were standing around figuring out how best to swipe biscuits when my father caught us idle. As my luckless brother appeared the more responsible, Papa assigned him a task.

Our neighbors next door had been in a car accident that landed the woman of the house in the hospital. Before they headed to stay with her there, Papa wanted my brother to deliver them a meal: a sumptuous holiday roast my mother had fixed. Potatoes, carrots, all the trimmings. My brother would find it in the refrigerator in a foil-covered pan.

He removed a pan without disturbing the foil, left, and returned minutes later. The neighbors' car pulled away. After lunch, Papa went to scrape the leftover scraps into the dish we kept in the fridge for our dog Gremlin — a bowl filled with gnawed bones, gristle and other not-fit-for-human-consumption crud. He removed the foil.

There sat a pristine roast.

Much hand-wringing and wailing of oaths commenced as my father absorbed the unthinkable: We had just served our ailing neighbors a Thanksgiving meal of dog food. Not much of it, either. All seemed lost until my father's eyes widened. The neighbors were gone, right? They hadn't looked, right? They'd showed him how to get in, right?

We'd just sneak in and swap the roast.

We crept up their drive and tiptoed in — a little ostentatiously, I thought. It's not like we were knocking over a casino. Yet my ashen father, cradling the roast like a payload of nitro, inched across their patio and sloooowly opened the door as my brother disappeared inside. My father had just about made it to the kitchen when the intercom erupted in squawking: "WHO'S THERE? GET OUT!"

My father almost shot-putted the roast across the room when my brother stepped out from behind a wall, doubled over laughing. My father vowed to revise his will. We opened their fridge, swapped the dog food for dinner, and raced back home, our errand of mercy complete.

A few days later, our neighbor returned the pan. He didn't say anything, other than thank you. But to this day, my father still insists he looks at him funny. —JIM RIDLEY

Campfire, Crescent Rolls and Biblical Rain

As a kid, I hated camping, which was unfortunate because it was my parents' favorite kind of vacation. For me, the outdoors held no charm that could compensate for being separated from my TV shows and nerdy hobbies. A youthful enthusiast of science fiction, history and feminism, I believed in "kids' lib" and railed against tyrannical vacation plans.

All my holiday memories, good and bad, pale against the year my parents decided we'd go camping for Thanksgiving. Camping in November wasn't unusual in North Texas, but I was incensed. My little brother, who was as wise and peacemaking at age 6 as I was angry and resentful at 12, tried to soothe my rage, pointing out that Glen Rose State Park was actually a pretty cool place. Dinosaur footprints were found there, the preserved tracks of the giant sauropods. Below that layer, he said, were millions of fossilized sea creatures, from the earlier era when an ancient ocean covered the prairie.

There we were at the campsite, with my mom's Thanksgiving dinner cleverly positioned in the fire (foil-wrapped turkey breast buried in the coals at the bottom), when the weather descended biblically, as it has throughout Texas history: doom-laden sheets of freezing rain. Our clothes got soaked; we changed; our clothes got soaked again. Around 5 p.m., the turkey could be gingerly pulled from the fire, and we four ate it in the station wagon with the heater on full blast. Holiday miracle No. 1: It was the most delicious meal of my life, with Pillsbury crescent rolls popped straight from heaven. Miracle No. 2: I didn't feel at all like saying, "I told you so." We finished dinner and drove straight home in the car cocoon, with trilobites and dinosaurs lying in peace below the dark, slick tarmac of I-35. —DANA KOPP FRANKLIN

Returning Dad's Gifts

My dad was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in September 2011. The last time I talked to him was a few days before Christmas, when he told me he hadn't had the energy to go and buy anyone presents yet. That's when I knew it was really bad. Christmas was my parents' time to shine. They delighted in traditions, decorations and the over-the-top spoiling of their children. My dad had promised my mom he wouldn't die on Christmas. Not Christmas, their favorite holiday. No way would he ruin that.

Two days before Christmas, my dad had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. He never quite woke up, but true to his word, he held on past the holidays. A couple days past the New Year, he passed away.

Understandably, my mom couldn't deal. So, as the oldest, I tried to keep it all together. Weeks went by, and the pile of my dad's unopened Christmas presents sat there. Staring at us. Reminding us. I had to get them out of there.

Wanna throw a real party? Open a dead loved one's Christmas presents! I quietly judged everyone's purchases. Would he have liked this fishing shirt from Belk? Possibly. University of Alabama sweatshirt: thumbs up. Contraption that made quick popsicles? Thrown back into Bed, Bath and Beyond with vigor. Each present went back to the store, and we collected store credits we would never use. The one bright spot? The electric bug zapper tennis racket that I had purchased, knowing how much my dad loved to hit the moths in the kitchen, delighting when he got a good kill. My mom clamored for it, unknowingly accepting the job of house protector. —ELIZABETH JONES

A Food Court Christmas

My family celebrates a conventional Christmas. At least, conventional in a commercial sense. They're devout Christians, but since their denomination, Church of Christ, doesn't necessarily see Christmas Day as Christ's birthday — "We don't know when Jesus was actually born, so we should live every day like it's his birthday," was the sort of sentiment I often heard as a child — Christmas was always more about food, piles of presents and all-day pajama hangs, and we didn't really celebrate Christmas Eve.

When I reached adulthood, the piles of presents remained, though the recipients changed. The Rodgers Christmas is now about my little nieces, as it should be. I make the trek out to Hendersonville on Christmas morning, I watch my nieces tear through the piles, I help my father collect the torn wrapping paper, and I eat obscene amounts of my mother's food (casseroles and cookies and these absurdly addictive cinnamon twists she makes using crescent roll dough). But Christmas Eve is another story. Any roommate or girlfriend or close pal I've ever had typically spends the night before Christmas with his or her family in a different city or state, so I stay behind, basking in the lonesomeness that can be found in public spaces.

I go see the latest showing of the biggest, dumbest blockbuster I can find. I do my Christmas shopping in the gift-card section of Walgreens with the rest of the city's puzzled-looking single adult males, picking up iTunes gift cards and shrugging to one another, wondering "Do 11-year-olds still use iTunes?" A strange quiet exists amid the bustling throngs of holiday shoppers, diners and moviegoers. I find solace there, people-watching at malls and restaurants — the eye of Hurricane Christmas that is a food court on Dec. 24. —D. PATRICK RODGERS

My Last Christmas as a Jew

Warning: This anecdote contains spoilers. If young children are reading, they might want to stop reading right about here, right about now.

As a little Jewish boy who grew up in a Not-so-Nashville part of the country with a great big Not-so-Nashville Jewish population, the concept of Santa was always merely that, a concept. That said, like Christian boys and girls, I grew up in a home with a Christmas tree and presents. My parents liked the idea. But I'm pretty sure I never bought into that Santa Claus bullshit. I knew the better mall was the mall that had a Santa sporting a real beard — I knew there were fake Santas, and only fake Santas. On Christmas Day, 1989, I went to Las Vegas for the first time on a family vacation, where, in my 8-year-old brain, I just assumed that all Santas dressed like Elvis. My cousins were a couple years older than me and their mom was Christian, so by extension, they were Christian. No bigs. But their side of the family made a much bigger deal out of Christmas. While visiting, all this Santa Claus stuff came up and before I knew it, at only 8 years old, I'd ruined childhoods and shattered lives — I accidentally told those kids the truth about Santa. My WASPy aunt called me a "little monster" (a term that stuck for some years) and sent me packing. And I thought I was just a Jew? —AL GODDAM

The Year Santa Got Divorced

When I was a little girl, my dad dressed up like Santa for the local Sears portrait studio, and I have a few years' worth of photos of tiny me sitting on Santa's lap, growing more aware that his twinkle-eyed smile was familiar. As a grown-up, we kept a few of our old traditions, but new ones sprung up every couple years — watching the extended version of Lord of the Rings over and over, or driving around my small hometown trying to find the most disastrously tacky lights while listening to The Waitresses. But like a lot of kids, the year that I remember most vividly was the worst. (That's got to be the downside of a happy childhood, right? That it seems like all the good times make the bad times more memorable.) My parents had just gotten divorced, and my dad forgot to put up a Christmas tree that year. Somehow that oversight spoke volumes to me in a language my 12-year-old mind wholly understood. The lack of cheer, the blank slate, the dumbstruck dad who was suddenly cast in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable role as Bachelor Father. That was the year my dad, my first Santa Claus, seemed real and human for the first time, and I can't say I ever got used to it. —LAURA HUTSON

Tell us your best, worst and weirdest holiday stories at nashvillescene.com — we'll post some of our favorites on our arts and culture blog, Country Life, throughout the season.