Thanks but NO Thanks : Holidays: Everyone dreams of the tender bronze turkey, but Thanksgiving Day reality can be a far cry from a cover photo of Good Housekeeping.

Smells, sounds, tastes. Thanksgiving brings the senses to life. It ushers in the holiday season with beauty and warmth, with love, kindness and friendship.

Turkey aroma wafting from the oven of grandma’s immaculate kitchen, Aunt Mabel’s yams still gurgling in the Corningware, pumpkin pie cooling on the counter, shrinking little by little as the grandkids sneak little pinches of crust and fingerscoops of filling.

Thanksgiving brings families together to share the present and retell the past.

Remember Uncle Joe’s wild yarns? Remember the way Sis used to nod off all curled up by the hearth? How about those walks to the rose garden with Grandpa Sid? It’s a holiday worthy of any diary, with scenes ready-made for the photo album.

Yeah, right.

To many, extended family means prolonged agony. That turkey aroma doesn’t exactly waft, sometimes it shrouds. And the way mom cooks, stench might be more accurate than aroma.

Of course, everyone remembers old Uncle Joe’s stories, but that’s because Uncle Joe was a loon, and the family could hardly wait to get away from him. Sure those stories of the past bring back memories, but what do you think all those therapy sessions were about anyway? The cousins haven’t spoken a word to each other since that old lock-him-in-the-trunk-and-roll-the-car-down-the-hill story was brought up last year.

Suffice it to say, Thanksgiving is not always the Hallmark holiday people would like it to be. There are late-arriving guests (some of them fresh out of the clink), burnt offerings, discolored your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine food items on the plate and hairy birds, dead and alive.

But hey, these less-than-ideal settings are as much a part of the holiday as anything else. Most people, given enough time, can think of a Thanksgiving that would make Norman Rockwell cringe.

For proof of this, and so you won’t feel alone in your misery if this day turns out to be a turkey, we asked locals to share some of the disasters that have befallen them on this most glorious occasion.

All the Fixin’s

Food is the key to any memorable Thanksgiving. Of course, memorable can be forgettable too. Everyone dreams of the tender bronze turkey, but reality can be a far cry from the cover photo of the holiday edition of Good Housekeeping.

Eighteen-year-old Simi Valley resident David (he wouldn’t give his last name because, he said, “my mother will kill me”), knows how bad things can get. “It was horrible. Awful. It was our meal last year. We had a turkey and it was bleeding. We had a bleeding turkey,” he said. “We had cold peas, the cranberries were just out of the jar, plop , and the stuffing was like sticky, stuck together in a big clump. The mashed potatoes were all runny, like milk.

“My mom, she’s the worst cook. I think I was the only one who complained. My sister couldn’t say anything because she helped cook it. And my dad didn’t say a word. He just kinda looked at his plate.”

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Moms, because they do the majority of the cooking, apparently take the bulk of the blame. “One time my mother cooked a turkey and it came out raw. Another time her pumpkin pie was green. Avocado green. I don’t know what she did to it,” said Diana Caskey, foster care recruiter for the Ventura County Department of Children’s Services. “She always burned the rolls.”

There’s perhaps no greater expert on charred foodstuffs than professional clown Dennis Van Vuren of Simi Valley. “Every year, for the past 11 years, no matter what my mother-in-law tried to do, she always burned the buns in the oven,” he said. “She’d always say, ‘It’s your fault, son-in-law. You’re always burning my buns.’ So last year she had me cook the buns--and, of course, I burned the buns.”

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A batch of burnt buns can be a bummer but at least they’re only part of the Thanksgiving meal. There are those occasions when the whole feast takes kind of a nasty turn.

“About 12 years ago my sister got married and decided to have the family over for her first Thanksgiving and to do her first turkey,” said Pam Hartwell, general manager of The Esplanade mall in Oxnard.

“Well, she went to prepare the turkey, and you know that little bag in there? The bag inside the bird with the giblets and neck? She left it in. Cooked the turkey that way, with the bag and everything in it. There were 15 or 16 of us, and we all got violently ill soon after eating,” said Hartwell. “First, cramps. I mean severe, really severe, abdominal cramps. Then sick. After that, the dry heaves. You know the kind? When there’s nothing left in you and you just continue to heave? We all had ptomaine poisoning.”

(To date, Sis has yet to cook an encore Thanksgiving dinner.)

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Anyone remember sitting down in front of that 24-pound fowl and watching Dad, or some revered uncle or aunt, carve the thing with gem cutter-like precision, the lean slices stacking up like sheets of paper?

In Ramon Torrez’s family, the carving tradition is still going strong. “I’ve got this crazy uncle with the power knife,” said Torrez, a resident of Oxnard. “He just shreds the turkey with it every year.” Torrez’s story seems more like a Stephen King tale.

“Nobody really thinks about it--you know, we’re busy talking and getting to the table,” he said. “But then, when the plate with the turkey arrives, it’s Chicken of the Sea. I mean, pureed.”

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Sometimes the best cooking skills and the sharpest utensils can’t make up for the lack of, well, a turkey. That’s when families need to improvise. Magician Ted Wakai, the “Wizard of Oxnard,” likes to entertain the younger relatives at his Thanksgiving gatherings with stories of the tough old days.

“I tell the story of how we were so poor we couldn’t afford a turkey, so we had chicken. Then I do a little chicken trick and magically produce a chicken,” he said. “I produce an egg from an empty bag and get the guys to come up to me. I tell them, ‘Cup your hands, flap your wings, say cock-a-doodle-doo ,’ and an egg drops out of the bag. I use that egg and put it into another bag. I say, ‘Say the magic word,’ and ‘Happy Thanksgiving,’ and a chicken flies out of the bag.”

Family Togetherness

OK, so the food doesn’t always come out just right. At least the holiday gives the family a chance to spend some much-appreciated and desired time together. Or maybe it’s just the idea of free food that inspires the third cousins to visit Grandpa Ed’s place once a year, like clockwork.

Then again, getting everyone in the same place at more or less the same time can be a little tricky, especially if the police are out in force.

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“There was the time that my nephew was late for dinner and we worried and worried,” said Camarillo’s Gloria Kahn. “It turned out he had gotten stopped and thrown in jail for an outstanding traffic warrant--when all he was doing was trying to get to Thanksgiving dinner without being late.” As it turned out, there was a glitch in the police computer. The ticket had already been paid, and the nephew was released for the feast.

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Sometimes, though, the holiday run-ins with the law can be a bit more complicated. “A few years ago my mother sent me to the store to go buy stuff for Thanksgiving, and she sent me with her check and her driver’s license to pay for it. The car belonged to my mother’s friend,” said Cristy Warner, manager of Network Personnel Agency in Ventura. “I got off at Kanan Road, came to a stop and then turned right on red. Next thing I know, I got pulled over by the police.” Warner hadn’t seen the “No Turn on Red” sign.

The officer was not in the holiday spirit, she said. “He was probably mad he was working on Thanksgiving, because he just had this really bad attitude. I asked him if he could let me off because it was Thanksgiving, but he said, ‘I’ve given enough warnings out today.’ ” So Warner handed over the driver’s license and accepted the ticket, and the officer was on his way.

“That’s when I realized what I’d done,” she said. “I’d given him my mother’s license by mistake. The ticket was in my mother’s name, and I knew she was going to kill me. The cop was already gone, but I knew I had to find him. I went to the first place I could think of. It was Winchell’s doughnuts. It was pretty amazing, but I actually found him there. He crossed out my mother’s name, put my name on it and handed it back to me. He was so awful. I said, ‘Why don’t you just get another job?’ ”

A Strange Taste

OK, the family’s all seated, the food’s actually on the table--nothing broken, nothing burned. But there’s something in the air, an uneasiness as if a loved one were in some discomfort.

That’s kind of how sisters Crystal Jacobs and Bridgette Goudeau of Port Hueneme felt at Thanksgiving dinner in 1980.

See, the sisters’ Louisianian granddad had decided on a natural, rustic holiday that year. Months in advance of Thanksgiving, he bought a tiny (live) turkey. The kids named it Tom, let it run around the yard and treated it as a pet. Grandfather warned them that Tom was being raised for a particular November dinner, but the kids held out hope that the bird would still be around for Christmas.

One day, close to Thanksgiving, Tom’s neck took a clean break at Granddad’s hands and Tom was hung up by string in the back yard to be plucked. But Granddad, as good a slaughterer as he was, wasn’t much of a plucker. As the girls sat down for their Thanksgiving meal they noticed something odd. Yes, their pet was on the plate set before them, but there was something else.

“Tom still had hair,” Crystal said.

“It was truly disgusting,” Bridgette said.

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Sometimes the turkey doesn’t survive Thanksgiving, sometimes it does. Thousand Oaks resident Jeanette Scovill, president of the California Vegetarian Assn., wouldn’t be caught dead with a dead turkey. But she does have turkeys at her Thanksgiving meals.

“The first year we invited a live turkey to our house for Thanksgiving, I was wearing a green dress with shiny fabric, and the turkey was attracted to it,” Scovill said. “I was trying to serve food, and the turkey was chasing me around. It finally occurred to me that I should offer him some corn bread stuffing.”

Alone and Thankful

When it comes right down to it, family is family, and having them around is more or less a meaningful experience. Unfortunately, there are certain times in one’s life when it’s impossible to be part of a family gathering.

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“In 1979 I was in Guatemala in a town called Quezaltenango, studying Spanish,” Ojai artist Bernadette DiPietro said. “I awakened on Thanksgiving and found that the house was covered in ash because the night before, the volcano had erupted.”

Apparently the eruption startled some turkeys that were being raised in the neighbor’s yard. “The whole day, the turkeys were gobbling. I kept asking what sound that was and people kept saying, ‘ Chompipe , chompipe .’ I looked it up and it was turkey ,” DiPietro said. “The chompipe kept reminding me the whole day that it was Thanksgiving, as I was eating my beans and rice.”

Ojai storyteller Jim Cogan knows what it feels like to spend Thanksgiving alone, nestled in the hands of Mother Nature.

It was a Thanksgiving a long, long time ago, said Cogan. He had recently moved to Idaho to be a schoolteacher. With no family around for the holiday, he was at a loss for what to do. But for someone with his imagination, it was only a momentary loss.

“There was a place out there called Craters of the Moon, filled with lava tubes and caves,” Cogan said. “The weather had turned recently warm, so I thought, ‘Why don’t I go sleep in the caves?’ ”

After a 1 1/2-hour trek through lava, Cogan arrived at an empty campground with a sleeping bag and a loaded backpack.

“I set up a couple of candles, had a little bit of leftover turkey, a lot of fruit, and ate by candlelight. There was literally not a single sound,” he said. “I remember eating, climbing up and looking at the stars.”

Cogan awoke the next day to find himself surrounded by an inch-thick layer of snow that reflected the rising sun. “It created a tremendous rosy-red dawn,” he said. “It looked like lava and it seemed like I was there at the Creation.”

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Mike Malloy, the patrol agent in charge of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Oxnard station, usually works on Thanksgiving. He generally tries to have dinner with his family before he starts his business day. But in 1986, that wasn’t possible.

“I was with a lot of other Border Patrol agents, my family was at home and we had just gotten to McAllen, Tex., right before Thanksgiving. We were on a drug operation, gone for two months,” Malloy said. “It was a tough time because I also was making the decision to go through a divorce. It was lonely. The other Border Patrol agents and I ate dinner at the Sheraton.”

While Malloy was in college, he and some friends spent a Thanksgiving in the woods, eating rabbits and squirrels, so the Sheraton might have been a culinary improvement.

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Well, that’s just about everything that can go wrong at Thanksgiving but the kitchen sink.

“We were sitting at the table, in the middle of dinner, and the kitchen sink backed up,” said Patti Thompson, a Ventura business manager. “I don’t know if it was the potatoes or onions in there or what, but it was pretty awful. We couldn’t finish dinner. We had to get up and go get a snake and snake out the kitchen sink while our friends just sat there.”