1. The first holiday after we were married, we decided to have the festivities at our apartment with both of our families and all of our siblings. Everything was perfect—the pies were exquisite and everything was going fine until I was bringing out a dish of sour cream for the baked potatoes. As I was walking to the table, my foot caught on the area rug and I tripped forward. I held on to the bowl, but the sour cream went flying, right down my new mother-in-law's back and over the new dress that she was wearing. Needless to say, she was quite surprised and everyone else was in hysterics. I was severely embarrassed, and no one in the family has ever let me forget in the last 31 years.

2. While preparing cranberry sauce from fresh whole cranberries, my mother spilled the berries on the kitchen floor. Our family cat went crazy chasing the berries all over the kitchen. It was so funny watching the cat scurry after the cranberries that after the clean up, I decided to roll a couple of cranberries on the floor to watch the cat go nuts all over again. Now it's tradition to drop cranberries on the floor every year and watch our cat go nuts. He even eats one or two cranberries after the chase. If our cat likes them, they have to be good.

3. My Uncle Frank and Aunt Lee used to come to our home for the holidays every year since I was a baby. My mom inherited this old creamer that was in the shape of a cat. She decided one year to use it as a gravy boat. Well, my poor Uncle Frank was unaware of her switch and poured gravy into his coffee. My aunt was always telling him to mind his manners and not complain at the dinner table. The poor man drank his coffee with gravy instead of cream! He drank the whole cup without asking my mom for a new cup with cream. To this day we always bring up the "cat creamer" and have a good laugh about Uncle Frank and his cup of gravy flavored coffee.

4. The hospital unit where I worked always held a dinner during the holidays, and everyone signed up to bring their favorite foods. One particular year, I agreed to bring two pumpkin pies for dessert. The night before the dinner, I assembled my ingredients and baked three pies, two for work and one to keep at home. Left on the kitchen counter to cool, I unfortunately underestimated the reach of our Dalmatian puppy. Before I knew it, she had reached up and nibbled the edge off one of the pies. After putting her outside in disgrace, we decided to cut off the part she had eaten and indulge in a piece for ourselves. After all, I had planned on keeping one anyway, right? With eager anticipation, we bit into the pie, only to spit it back out. It was terrible! I had baked dozens of pies before, but never had one turn out so awful. After some investigation, I discovered I had forgotten to put the sugar in. If our dog wouldn't have done what she did, I would have taken the pies to work and been humiliated when one of my co-workers discovered the terrible taste! So instead of being chastised, the dog was a hero—or should I say, heroine. Incidentally, she became much more well-behaved later!

5. Last year, I thought it would be nice to make homemade cranberry sauce. We were all laughing and having a good time while I was putting what I thought was sugar into my recipe. Well, about an hour later we all sat down to the table and were digging into all the goodies when all of the sudden my son yelled "Yuck!" I thought that it was something that my mother-in-law had cooked that he didn’t like, but it was my cranberries. I had put salt in the recipe instead of sugar--much to my surprise. We all had a good laugh about that one and after we got up from dinner and went to clean up, I made sure that I had marked the container in bold letters with SALT.