7 festive faux pas

Pubs around the UK reveal their Christmas disasters ­ for obvious reasons they will remain nameless "Last Christmas we had a carvery operation and on Christmas Eve the meat delivery came in. We had such a demand for turkeys (we had ordered about 15 or so) but the suppliers sent us 15 4lb chickens instead. It was a nightmare, the chefs came out of the kitchen waving these puny little chickens around the bar saying, What kind of turkeys are these?'" "One year we had a party of 40 booked for Christmas dinner, all of whom had paid a 10% deposit. A couple of days beforehand they completely cancelled, saying I could keep the deposit. There I was on Christmas day with £100 in my hand and an empty restaurant­ I insist on taking 100% deposits now." "The worst Christmas Day I've ever worked was the one when our chef ran away. We have live-in chefs from abroad and one of them just upped and left, leaving only his shoes behind in his bedroom. A few days later I went back upstairs to find him lying asleep on his bed, still wearing his jacket and rucksack ­ but no shoes. We had to let him go after that." "An old man collapsed half way through Christmas dinner last year, sending his granddaughter into hysterics. She went running through the pub and I had to lock her in a room to calm her down, while the others attended to the poor old man passed out on the restaurant floor. It was horrific. The mother kept shouting: "Get his teeth out, get his teeth out!" but we couldn't ­ he was gripping them too hard." "A few Christmases ago, our chef made a batch of chocolate sponge puddings he was planning to serve with white chocolate ice-cream for dessert. Foolishly, we left them sitting by the steamer and half of them melted. We tried to do a rescue operation but only a few were presentable in the end. We had to buy in dessert that year." "We took over this pub on the7 December, when the licensee beforehand had already started taking bookings for Christmas. He had put down only the surnames and times of these bookings into the diary, with no indication of numbers. We had to estimate as best we could and cooked enough for 70 people ­ which was thankfully more than we needed in the end." "On Christmas Day last year, two hours before a party of 60 was due to sit down to dine, the air conditioning unit went on the blink. Anti-freeze liquid started trickling out onto the table and we couldn't get it to stop all the way through dinner. One poor doctor had to keep getting up to change the bucket by his chair all night.