My first Xmas dinner involved considerable reading up and then in a food magazine Delia Smith kindly laid it all out for me from 7:00 am put the turkey in to 2:00 pm eat that puppy, so I had the recipes and timelines. I bought the most expensive free ranger I could find when they weren't that easy to get, a bottle of champagne, some orange juice and a lovely bottle of white.
So we cracked the champagne and I got on with the cooking, turning the turkey every 30 minutes as directed for the juciest moistest turkey ever, I had been promised.
Once we were about half way through the wine I got my new carving knife out and went to work. After ten minutes I've got about four ounces of white meat on a plate and I'm getting nowhere fast, so I check the carving diagram, and I'm not as stupid as I thought. I was doing the right things in the right bits so now I'm just angry and going to beat my butcher to death with this dud of a turkey he sold me. Got some leg meat though, and we ate.
And I nap, and when I wake up I see two huge platters of turkey and ask whether my mother-in-law had come around with some for us, only to be told someone not as well oiled as myself had turned the turkey one more time so it was the right side up, and apparently things got considerably easier that way. I swear to God I got more meat out of the bottom end of a turkey than anyone else in history - ever. The next Xmas, I go to get the turkey out of the fridge to cook it and rugrat #1 has stuck a label on the breast - 'this side up.'