The Ottawa Senators had an interesting promotional giveaway planned for their Thanksgiving Day game on Monday afternoon against the Los Angeles Kings at Canadian Tire Centre. They were scheduled to distribute specialty gravy boats shaped like little Zambonis to the first 10,000 fans who arrived for Monday’s game.

However, it looks like they missed the boat on this one.

The Senators say a labour disruption has stranded the gravy boats at a Halifax shipping port. So now the first 10,000 fans who arrive on Monday will receive a voucher for a free popcorn and soft drink.

The gravy boat giveaway will now take place before the Senators' home game against the Nashville Predators on Saturday, December 7th when fan gravy needs will begin to swell again.

“We are disappointed we could not execute our gravy boat giveaway on Monday, but this was a situation that was completely out of our control,” said Senators senior vice president of marketing and customer engagement Jeff Harrop. “But we are excited to have the giveaway in December where we can still tie it into a nice holiday theme.”

Interestingly enough, it's the second Senators' fan giveaway that's gone awry because of shipping issues out east. In 2015, TSN 1200 radio (my former employer) ordered up 10,000 Hamburglar masks to give away to fans during goalie Andrew Hammond's amazing Hamburglar run.

But they, too, were held up by shipping problems out east and suddenly wouldn't arrive in time. We had promoted the hell out of it, so the station ordered replacement masks locally.

Not only were the local masks of borderline quality, but our promo team realized the elastics weren't even attached to them. So, station staff members were called into the Canadian Tire Centre to attach 10,000 elastics in time for the game. There were about 20 of us with staplers, furiously fixing the masks one at a time. We made it, but they were terrible.

Anyway, whether it's a radio promo or a Thanksgiving giveaway, sometimes things don't work out as planned. And that's okay.

At least the gravy boats weren't thrown from helicopters and hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement.