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Something Light: Thanksgiving traditions
Our youngest son said to me yesterday, “Mom, I never realized how many Thanksgiving traditions we have.” Then he named a few, including the gathering of family at our home; our en masse “Thanksgiving Walk” (in which the extended Vincent family tries to walk off some turkey-and-stuffing calories before chowing on dessert); and a little sharing game where we tell each other two things we’re thankful for, each time dropping a piece of Indian corn into a special jar maintained by my mother-in-law.
That jar is getting awfully full. And the written list of blessings that my MIL has recorded as we dropped our corn in the jar is getting mighty long — a family record of God’s faithfulness.
What are your family’s Thanksgiving traditions?
Topic: Just for Fun, WorldMagBlog
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back to top30 Comments to “Something Light: Thanksgiving traditions”
Dad gets a turkey drumstick, after that the rest is up for grabs.
I make real mashed potatoes instead of instant.
Not much, is it? I guess traditions develop in extended families, where they get passed on to the next generations. But both my family and my husband’s are spread out across several states, and if we do get together it’s for Christmas, not Thanksgiving. So the people we share Thanksgiving with are whoever I find who has no family to spend Thanksgiving with (remembering how much that meant to me when people included me at their Thanksgiving table when I was younger). So we will have a friend (who does have family close by but she goes to their home for Thanksgiving out of familial duty and not because she wants to, since she was abused as a child) and her husband, a friend of theirs whose son lives 6 hours away (and can’t make the trip because he has to work until 10 pm tonight and has to be at work Friday at 4 am), and a co-worker of my husband whose daughter is going to be visiting with her husband’s family.
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Actually, our recent family Thanksgiving tradition consists of fixing up, decorating and getting ready for the annual get-together of my wife’s large family. It started out years ago as a Christmas dinner. (Elvera took me to her family dinner in Columbia in 1955. They drew names and exchanged small (some dollar limit) gifts. I didn’t take anything, but got some handkerchiefs.) Well, the children became involved in church plays, choirs, etc and they kept moving the meeting day around. They finally settled on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Nothing was happening on that day. It was held at a different sibling’s house each year, but Polly and Elvera lived in Va., so they didn’t have it, but we always came for the dinner. When Mel retired, he and Polly moved here to Hendersonville in 1994. Since then they held the dinner at Polly’s house.
It’s another story, but the reason we are here is because Polly is. We came in May, 2001.
Mel & Polly decided that their place on a mountainside, was too much for them to care for and they moved into a condo where all outside work is performed by the commuity contractors. So, where do we now have the dinner?
We expect about 30 people. Some of the younger don’t come for various reasons. My granddaughter has a ticket to the Carolina-Clemson game, and it will be her last game (she graduates). Everybody brings something, Polly fixes the turkey, Elvera buys a ham and has party mix strowed about. Her brother, Ted, died in July and his family will drop out, since his wife seldom came and his children never did. Elvera regrets this, because family has always been important to her.
Enough, I could ramble on. But, to answer your question, I will be doing as I’m told. “Bring those chairs from the basement. Move that stuff off the deck,” etc.
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We started having this dinner in 2003. About that time, I started ringing the bell, as a Lion, at the WalMart for the Salvation Army on that Saturday on the 6:00-8:00 pm shift. It gives me a chance to get away after everyone has gone and Elvera & Polly straighten things up a bit.
They aren’t having a 6-8 shift this year. I don’t know what I will do, but I don’t want to be around.
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After dinner all the men fall asleep in front of a football game, then women try to see who can get the closest to the remote before they all wake up and yell “We’re watching that?”
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kbells: LOL
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My family life has always been so mixed up that I have no real Thanksgiving tradition except that I always went to my ex-husbands mothers house. I always thought she made the best cornbread dressing and I refused to eat anyone elses. Last year she bailed on me at the last minute and she and George went to someone elses house for Thanksgiving leaving me with a 9 yr old who was upset. I found out I could do the whole shabang and I make the 2nd best cornbread dressing I have ever tasted (she still has many years practice under her belt so I will let her have the #1 postition.)
This year Chloe and I are going over to some friends house where there will be children her age.
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Now the our sons are grown, my wife wants to start a tradition of having our Thanksgiving at our house, instead of with her Family at her parents or brother’s house.
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Here’s one that always seems odd to “outsiders.” It is a Baltimore tradition to have sauerkraut with the Thanksgiving turkey. This is not just my family – it is really a city thing.
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I like your family traditions Lynn. Very appropriate and ones I’ve tried to incorporate several times over the years. (By the way do you do all of the cooking or does everyone help out?)
This year and last year we went to our son and daughter-in-laws and grandchildren’s place for dinner – before that I had them here for dinner.
In years past we’ve also helped serve at the community dinner held at the local fire hall for those who have no family.
Football is also a part of our Thanksgiving – unfortunately.
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We went over to our daughter and daughter-out-of-law’s house last weekend. Random Granddaughter served us a picnic lunch for our beach party Thansgiving. She has a picnic basket with wooden picnic foods. Some of the foods are pre-scliced but the slices stick together with velcro. Then she has a little wooden knife which she uses to “slice apart” the apple and other foods. She doesn’t have any electronic toys, but this was a charming non-electronic high tech toy.
Then she looked at the cloudy sky and and said, “It’s sunny outside. Let’s go for a swim.” We swam on the living room floor.
Thanksgiving day some of the other grandparents are coming across the country to visit RG. My wife and I are going out next weekend to a restaurant. (There is no family split or feud. We just don’t like big Thanksgiving get-togethers. We will get together with the other grandparents at another time.
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We listen to Arlo Guthrie’s 25-minute Thanksgiving classic – “Alice’s Restaurant”.
While all food is usually prepared from scratch, there is a regular tradition of eating store bought cranberries. The kind that comes in a tin and slides out in one big cylinder. If you get the good Ocean Spray kind, you can still see the lines from the can in the cranberry tube! It looks so perfectly geometric on a crystal serving dish. It’s always a treat to get first slice, as you can carve out a nice cranberry ellipse. Remember your 9th grade conics lessons in math?
Given that meal-time is usually mid-afternoon, there’s always been an informal tradition of someone heading to the kitchen late-night, usually after a card game. They stand there with the fridge open for about 4 minutes, surveying the scene before hauling out the bird, dressing, cranberry sauce, and other accoutrements for a round of cold sammies. Other’s in the house soon notice, and soon there’s maybe eight people in the kitchen bumping into each other. Half of the contents of the fridge is back out on the counter. Forks into everything, fingers too. The Mom’s, Grandmothers, and other Thanksgiving chefs have no part of this. This is the hour of the fridge raiders. We have returned to claim our midnight L-tryptophan. Culinary entropy abounds, and soon the clean and organized kitchen is completely upside down again. The sammies are always the best anyone’s ever tasted, and we vow that next year we should just skip dinner and go straight to the turkey sandwiches.
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Big Thanksgiving dinners are inevitable for us. We are happy when the head count is under 40.
We didn’t realize it for awhile, but we have a tradition of eating outside. We are in So Cal and we have always eaten outside since it is the only space large enough to seat us all.
Once we were up at the in-laws in Idaho and my son was aghast that grandma had planned all these tables inside! He said, “Aren’t we suppose to eat outside? Isn’t that part of the tradition? Didn’t the Pilgrims eat outside?” When I pointed out that it was only 40 degrees outside he sighed, “Well I guess we’re not going swimming then either.”
Tomorrow it will be a chilly 65 here in San Diego County, but we will still be dining outside and swimming most of the day. Then we will all cram inside for pie and USC football.
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Travis, brilliant fridge-raider story. I’m one of the mom’s so I have to pretend to be disturbed at this male bonding ritual. Thanks for reminding me of the cold sam festival. That is where the, now quite un-geometric, cranberry sauce comes into it messiest glory.
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My older brothers are 7-14 years older than me, so they were moving out as the younger ones and I were growing up, and then coming home for Thanksgiving and Christmas until they moved out of town. Meanwhile they established a few traditions we still keep, mainly playing board games all the time we aren’t cooking or eating. (No games on TV for my family, though it’s mostly guys.)
We also usually have the same items, though my brother’s family (where I go these days) varies those just a little. For me, Thanksgiving must have turkey and regular stuffing (no cornbread stuffing and nothing made with raisins and apples but no bread), cranberry sauce, black olives, real mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie with lots of whipped cream.
Last year the whipped cream was generic and sugar free, and the pumpkin pie was some sort of healthy recipe–I took just a small slice, and I couldn’t eat it all, it was so bad! The worst part was I’d taken regular Cool Whip myself, but was told not to open it because we had the other goo, so I knew I could have made the pie at least edible. Sunday I had access to pumpkin pie and ate a slice, knowing I might be dessert-free this Thanksgiving!!
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Cheryl: oh, the pain of taking a bite of Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, only to learn that some wacko health nut (probably that relative with the Kucinich bumper sticker
)has replaced the real thing with a tofu/spice-free/fake-sugar slice of pure hell. I laud your eat-pumpkin-pie-now-because-you-never-know-about-later ethos!
And Travis is dead-on correct about the canned cranberry sauce. Delicious, and it presents so beautifully, wobbling in its dish. Love it.
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We do all the typical dinner “traditions.” Turkey, dressing, cranberries, pumpkin pie etc.
We watch football. We nap. We have turkey sandwiches for dinner. Then . . .
We go out as a family in the evening to the movie theater to watch an animated movie. We’ve been doing that since the kids were very little. We’ve never stopped.
Last year I had my 32 year old son on my right, my 27 year old son on my left, his 25 year old sister sitting next to him and mom sitting next to her. The theater was filled with young children and us. We have vowed to do this tradition as long as we are alive.
Silly, yes, but it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without it.
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Oh yes, I forgot. Their spouses have picked up on the tradition and think it is cool and plan on doing it with their children.
Sorry, no grandchildren yet.
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Llamas try not to stomp each other to death or cover a friend or relative in spit. Haven’t been successful so fat but we are an optimistic herd and hope to one Thanksgiving.
Llamas also love tofu by the way just not for eating
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You can’t make Thanksgiving dinner healthy. The splendor of the meal is animal fat in all its renderings. As Diana Kennedy would say, “When in doubt, use lard.”
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Our extended family gets together at our place on the coast of Maine for my favorite meal of the year, Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings prepared by my wife, Barbara, a superb cook and incidentally a Mayflower descendant. My small part is to say by heart a part from William Bradford’s and Nathaniel Morton’s account of arriving at Plymouth, the end of which is:
If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean they had passed, and was now a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.”
These Pilgrims would be amazed at how this great nation has developed; we, on our part, celebrate Thanksgiving to God for our manifold blessings, well knowing the bravery and goodness of the brave Christians who first settled this country.
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I forgot to mention above, we will have Thanksgiving dinner with Mel & Polly and their daughters who come from Va. & Denver. They all show up at our house Saturday.
Adios is correct, you can’t make Thanksgiving dinner healthy. Forgot about it and enjoy. Don’t forget to be thankful.
I have too many things to enumerate at one time.
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Since my dad died a few years ago, my brother & I have switched back & forth with hosting Thanksgiving & Christmas. (Each year they get one & we get the other.)
This is our year for hosting Thanksgiving. My husband, Lee, who is an excellent cook, does the cooking. I do the clean up. (So I am very thankful for the dishwasher I received this week, as an early Christmas present.)
Lee will be making real whipped cream for the pies. But I’d be just as happy with Cool Whip. (Don’t tell Lee.)
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I remember one long-ago Thanksgiving (back when my father and his brother took turns hosting Thanksgiving for both our families plus Grandpa) when Aunt Connie whipped cream for the pumpkin pie. I watched, intrigued, as I had never really made the connection before between cream and whipped cream, and how the transformation took place.
I tried once to whip cream myself. I made butter.
Now I use Cool Whip.
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I like Thanksgiving. We’ll spend it with family this year. Unannounced, a bowl of black olives will appear on the table 10 minutes before dinner is served. All but one will be gone before we sit down. The last olive doesn’t have a chance after that. Tradition dictates I will fall asleep under a blanket on the couch after dinner and wake up for nothing but pumpkin pie.
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Our Thanksgivings are always bizarre. My wife comes from a crazy hippie family where both parents were radically liberal divorced yet socially interactive ministers.
They feel compelled to invite the strangest people and animals on the planet to overrun our quiet NH home every Thanksgiving. We have transvestites and street people and the down-and-out including mangy mutts and the ugliest junkyard dogs you can imagine. I am a little surprised that barn yard animals don’t accompany more of them.
So what do I, a conservative straight lace proper New Englander with etiquette training do? Well I serve coffee, mash the potatoes and carve the humanely killed free range organic turkey, which of course only carnivores like myself and a few of the street people enjoy. And I thank God for allowing our home to be used by people who are outcast and lonely and have no where else to go.
My innards tell me this is the kookiest meal on the planet, but my heart says thank you God for the grace to extend a hand to those whom I would normally never associate with.
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Xion – My innards tell me that this is what it’s all about. Bless you all!
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Travis,
I’m glad someone else listens to “Alice’s Restaurant.” I always listen to it at home, but now that I’m living abroad, far from family, I woul have forgotten!
Since I’m away from home I’ve invited nine or ten Americans and others to celebrate in my tiny apartment. I hope some bring plates and forks and knives! My mom and grandmother mailed me homemade cornbread to make dressing (as Georgians call stuffiing) but unfortunately it got moldy en route.
Fortunately the sweet potatoes arrived okay!
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Perhaps 50 years ago, my aunt and uncle suddenly converted to vegetarianism.
Obsession with alternative health and nutrition is a family tradition. My father told his sister and her husband that unless they changed their diet and lifestyle they weren’t going to live very long.
They were so impressed with his argument, they leapfrogged my father (who was a health food fanatic but not a vegetarian) and went whole–”non-hog” into vegetarianism.
As my aunt and uncle-in-law had a large house and large table, our tradition was to hold the large family Thanksgiving at their Fullerton, California home. That year, my aunt announced, the turkey would be a tofu turkey.
Health food–yes, said my extended family. Tofu turkey was a step to far. (I’m sure all of you Christians can provide some analogy to a Christian family where one branch is too strict or literal or extreme for all the other Christians in the family.)
The crisis simmered for a couple of weeks. Shortly before Thanksgiving, my aunt relented. She would allow two turkeys to be prepared in her now vegetarian kitchen. Most end of the table held the toful turkey. The other end of the table held the flesh and bone turkey.
Most people took a bit of the tofu turkey out of politeness.
When our Christian neighbors have us over for dinner, we bow our heads when they say grace. When we have them over for dinner, they dig in without a grace when serve them dinner.
Some of the world lives in peace. I am thankful for that.
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Corrections: tofu turkey was a step TOO far.
One end of the table.
without a grace when we serve them dinner.
Other notes: my health food fanatic father re-converted his sister to being a health food fanatic. He died of a heart attack a few years later. (Although heart attack was listed as the cause of death, I suspect he really died of rage.)
My aunt is still a vegetarian (though now also eschews gluten as well) and still alive in her eighties (though now in Australia). She was a ballet dancer and ballet teacher; now she is crippled and can no longer walk.
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I never agree with Xion, but post #24 gets my wholehearted salute. That is indeed what it’s all about.
My traditions involve a traditional meal, but in different places and different branches of the family tree each year. The one constant is, at some point during the day, we watch Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
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