Two weeks before Thanksgiving, everything looks calm at Flying Saucer Pie Company from the outside. The parking lot of the Independence Heights bakery, cofounded in 1967 by the late William Leeson and now run by his daughter, Heather Leeson, is almost empty, with just a couple of customers visible through the front window. The only physical indication of any impending chaos is a tall, flying saucer–sporting pylon sign out front.

“Almost time to stand in line and make new friends,” reads the text on one side of the sign.

“For those about to bake, we salute you,” reads the other.

By Thanksgiving Eve, hundreds of Houstonians—many with folding chairs, sleeping bags, and tents in tow—will be camped out in a line that snakes through the bakery’s parking lot and down the sidewalk for at least two blocks as they patiently wait for the opportunity to purchase pies, which come in flavors like pecan, apple, pumpkin, cherry, strawberry cream, and key lime, for their Thanksgiving feasts. Some people toward the front of the line will have been there since Monday or Tuesday, and they will have spent the past couple of days cooking meals on barbecue pits they’ve hauled in with them and spending their evenings drinking beer from kegs or doing shots before crawling into sleeping bags for some shut-eye. It’s a festive atmosphere more akin to the sort you would expect to find at a music festival or a football tailgate, and every year it gets wilder.

“We make a point to go out and visit with everybody so we can catch up and see what’s going on with the families and who moved to Colorado and is running a weed farm. Just gotta find out what’s going on with my people,” Heather Leeson laughs. “I have more than once rolled up at 2:30 in the morning to a bunch of guys asking me to do a shot, and I’ll be like, ‘Buddy, I gotta work for six to eight hours.’”

Leeson’s bakery sells 17,000 pies every year in the three days before Thanksgiving, and most people in the line—at least the ones who knew to get there early—will be able to get their hands on some. While managing such a crowd presents some unique challenges (Leeson has started bringing in porta-potties every year to decrease the number of people needing to come inside to use the restroom), the real battle happens in the weeks leading up to the big bonanza. “There’s no way my dad could have predicted what this would become, but we’ve got it down to a pretty fine art,” Leeson says.

Although Flying Saucer usually has just two work shifts—from 4:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.—every year during the final week of October the bakery switches over to a seven-days-a-week model that quickly turns into a 24-hour affair. For the next two months, Leeson and her staff will have two days off—Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day—as they power through all the prep work it takes to pull off the shop’s blockbuster holiday season. When it’s time to sleep or shower, they’ll drive up the street to a hotel Leeson rents several rooms in every year since there often won’t be enough time for them to make the journey back to their homes. Leeson, herself, will often catch just a couple hours of sleep at a time in a hammock chair hidden in the bakery’s super-secret enclosed back patio.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, thousands of baked pie shells (for the cream pies) are already stacked on multiple shelves on one side of the bakery alongside several plastic barrels loaded with apple pie filling. Inside the shop’s large walk-in cooler, thousands of unbaked pie crusts are sitting on racks, waiting for their time to be loaded with fillings before being eventually popped into the oven. Everything is done in blocks, Leeson says, and they start with the dough first.

The dough for the shop’s cream pies is the first thing that gets made. Once placed in pans, the uncooked crust will hang out in the walk-in cooler for 10 days before being pre-baked. Once baked, they’re shelf-stable at room temperature and stay crispy. Then the team starts on the other pies (like their fruit pies) where the dough and the fillings have to be cooked at the same time. They’ll make the fillings ahead of time, fill the pies, place the top dough, coat the tops with butter and sugar, then pop them in the cooler. Leeson says that the fruit pies can last raw in the cooler for up to a month, but they don’t like to push them that far because the fresher the item, the better.

“We make sure that the week of Thanksgiving, when we come in, we can have everything ready to bake as much as humanly possible,” Leeson says, noting that all pies will be baked up to 24 hours ahead of being sold.

The shop has five ovens that can bake 200 fruit pies at a time as well as two steam kettles that they can load up with 300 cream pies. In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, the ovens run 24-7.

“My dad used to say it was the world’s most ungraceful ballet,” Leeson says. “We have to do everything in a very specific order or it turns into a domino effect and everything will fall down and go wrong, and nobody needs that stress.”

Leeson should know. She’s spent every holiday season at the bakery since she was a child. When she was five years old, it was her job to fold boxes and answer the phone. “Looking back, I’m like, ‘Daddy, what were you thinking,’” she laughs about her days as a kindergarten phone receptionist. After box and phone duty, Leeson progressed to the front counter, then to baking and other responsibilities. In 1999, after finishing college, she joined her dad full-time at the bakery. She and her father ran it together until his passing in 2015, after which she took over the business entirely. “I have never had a Thanksgiving in my life that did not involve work. Not one. But that said, it’s very rewarding,” she says. Leeson’s 16-year-old daughter, who also started off on box duty, will be working the back door this year, and the children of several other people who work in the shop will also be performing various duties.

“A lot of stuff here is trial by fire. We just throw people at it,” Leeson says.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the pie shop will open its doors at 7 a.m. At 7 p.m., they’ll stop selling pies, regardless of if they sell out or not. On Thanksgiving Day, the shop will be closed, and Leeson and her staff will all be getting some much-needed rest at home—all while hoping someone else in their family had the foresight to take over turkey duty. The next day, they’ll be back at it again preparing for the equally busy Christmas season.

Although it’s a lot of work, Leeson says it’s all very much worth it. Her father, who immigrated to the United States from Canada as a young adult, started the bakery with only $600, and she sees the continued success of the Flying Saucer as a testament to the American Dream.

“He decided one day that the joy of being an American is that you have a dream to chase, and so this was his literal American Dream,” she says. “If I got to work and people weren’t camped out, I think my heart would break. It feels really good to see your father’s dream still going strong.”