And That’s Why We All Ate Hamburgers For Thanksgiving

A little (hopefully) humorous fiction for Thanksgiving.

For my first Thanksgiving as host, I bought the biggest turkey they had in the store.  I wanted to try something crazy I saw on Facebook, which was to cover the exterior of the turkey with bacon because, well, everything just tastes better with bacon.  Kind of like everything tastes better on a stick, only it’s bacon so it’s better.

So when Thanksgiving Day rolled around I stuffed the turkey with, you know, stuffing.  What else would I stuff it with?  I also wrapped the outside of the turkey with strips of bacon in a weave pattern just like the picture I had seen on Facebook.

NOM!

I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and shoved the turkey inside the oven and went about preparing the side dishes.  Mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, broccoli casserole, and other assorted yummy stuph were on my list of things to make.

A couple of hours later, as I was just finishing up the mashed potatoes, black smoke began to seep out around the edges of the oven door.  I opened the door to see what was amiss and a giant flame leapt out of the oven and singed all the hair on my left arm and eyebrow.

“FUUUUUUUUUUCK!” I screamed in painful agony. I quickly slammed the oven door shut.

My brother burst into the kitchen to see what all the commotion was about.  I informed him of the conflagration aflame inside the oven.  He laughed mischievously at the fact that I now only had one eyebrow before going to fetch the fire extinguisher.

He quickly returned with the extinguisher in hand.  “You open the door since you’re,” he stopped and laughed a moment more before continuing, “since you’re already missing a bunch of hair.”

I smacked him upside the head with my oven mitt.  “Just shut up and get ready to put out this fire,” I growled.

I moved to the right of the oven door while my brother pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and readied himself to, uh, fire.

“On the count of three,” I instructed.

My brother nodded.

We simultaneously counted to three.  I quickly pulled the over door open and jumped out of the line of fire (did you see what I did there?).  The deafening roar of the extinguisher then assaulted my ears.  I turned to see the entire kitchen covered with the unmistakable cloud of the fire extinguisher’s contents and, of course, smoke from my failed attempt to cook Thanksgiving dinner.  Within seconds, however, the exhaust fan had sucked the fire-retardant chemicals and smoke from the kitchen.

After the smoke had cleared, my brother and I inspected the remains of Thanksgiving “dinner.”  The humongous turkey I had bought was burned black and the bottom of the roasting pan was charred with crispy, burned grease.  The only reasonable conclusion my brother and I could come to is that the bacon grease at the bottom of the roasting pan had burned and then caught fire.

Needless to say, the turkey was no longer edible.  And that’s why we all ate hamburgers for Thanksgiving.