Thanksgiving Traditions

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

What do you do for Turkey day? (Brits, Canucks, and Aussies need not apply, you go to work, SUCKERS)

We have pie night. Dessert before dinner. Get real, no one ever has room for pie till HOURS after the feast. Thus, we have tons of pie on Wednesday night, ensuring we get our fill of pie goodness.

So, what do you do? Watch that lame parade? Sit around and watch football?

[42]

My  family mostly just gets together and eats, a lot (a lot refering to both the number of people and the amount of eating). And there is a lot of conversation, mostly about who needs help with what and what would people like for Christmas.

[Chimera]

My dad always insists we go for a walk afterward. Always. He's such a health freak, he can't help it--it's ingrained. (As if a 30 minute stroll can make up for the hour of gorging on rich food.  ) And, since it is always pleasant on Thanksgiving in California (I can't remember a single rainy day), we always go. It's actually quite nice--fun to go out and walk the paseo or look at houses as a family. My little brother, of course, is either "too cool" or too ADD to just walk--he usually brings his razor or bike. He's 16 now--maybe this year he'll insist on bringing his car.

Also, usually we go see a movie Thanksgiving evening. But last year, at Christmas, Mom stayed home with my niece and nephew so the rest of us could go to a movie. That will probably still be the family activity of choice, although not with the whole family. Sometimes, though, we watch old family videos. I like that--we have our favorites where we laugh and make fun of each other.

Oh, and I always make the jello. Always. I add cream cheese and bananas and make a lovely jello mold. I was relegated this duty long ago when that was about all I could handle in the kitchen without seriously injuring myself, objects, or others. Now I'm a much better cook--my mom's teasing that I'll have to make all the meals.  

Ah, nostalgia. Sorry for such a long post.

[The Jade Knight]

Get real, no one ever has room for pie till HOURS after the feast. Thus, we have tons of pie on Wednesday night, ensuring we get our fill of pie goodness.

So, what do you do? Watch that lame parade? Sit around and watch football?

This is all in the past tense; my grandmother died September, so who knows what the new tradition will be.  I'm in Canada this year, and Ari and I will be having Thanksgiving Dinner at the Prigoones', an elderly missionary couple from Australia.  The rest of my family is having it with Dad's side of the family (also unusual).  So, this is how things used to be:

Okay, we usually have Thanksgiving dinner starting at about 2 (in theory) or 3 (in practice).  Some of us sometimes skip breakfast or eat very light so we can gorge ourselves at Thanksgiving.  The entire extended family (or most of it, at least) shows up.  That's a LOT of people.  We usually have at least 3-4 types of Jello salad (sometimes more), a fruit salad or two, the standards (turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, candied yams), olives, mac & cheese (homemade, of course!) and/or scalloped potatoes with ham, steamed veggies & chees sauce, homemade rolls (and they're so delicious)… sometimes a green bean casserole, and lately this delicious yam casserole my aunt makes.

And that's just for the main course.  As you can imagine, it generally takes quite a while to get through all this.

At this point, the adults generally start sitting around talking, and the kids pile into Grandma's TV room to watch a movie (she has bazillions.  I'm guessing she had over 2-3 thousand movies).  Sometime during the film (usually about an hour after we've finished dinner), word gets out that grandma brought out the pies, at which point there's a mass exodus back into the kitchen/dining room to get pie.  Grandma generally makes about 30 pies each year (all by herself), and last year she made 9 gallons of ice cream to go with it.  Among pie flavours (that are seen virtually every year):
Banana Cream (my favourite)
Apple
Cherry
Cheesecake (sometimes more than one kind)
Chocolate Silk
Some raspberry version of the above
Lemon Cream
Mincemeat
Pecan
Peach (some times)
Blueberry
Pumpkin (with homemade whipped cream)

As far as ice cream goes, favourites include:
Fruit (a sort of tropical flavour)
Caramel
Mint Chocolate Chip
Peppermint
Maple Nut
Chocolate

As you can see, eating all this food quite naturally takes up the entire evening.  Any time there is downtime, we generally sit in the TV room watching movies and letting our stomachs settle.  The adults (by adults I mean parents) will sometimes play dominoes, but generally just sit around chatting.

[Faster Master St. Pastor]

The last couple of years we've just gone over to a relative's house.

When I was little before we started stuffing our faces we would pass around a candle while it was lit and say what we were thankful for.

[stacer]

The adults (by adults I mean parents)

This is how my aunts and uncles are referred to, too

My grandma and grandpa on both sides had seven kids, so family gatherings are huge whenever everyone is actually there. Rarely happens on my mom's side, because I have an aunt in Arizona and an aunt in California who have all but cut themselves off from the family, and the ones who live near each other don't like each other and haven't had a holiday together since the rip-roaring Thanksgiving when I was in 7th grade in which my Aunt Bonnie and Aunt Carol got into a fistfight on the back porch.

Dad's side like each other much better, but we can't afford for most of us to get together for Thanksgiving anymore, what with the cousins all grown up and spread across the country (from Seattle to Rhode Island, at this point), and even an uncle in Oregon. But the tradition has always been Thanksgiving at Aunt Becky's house and Christmas at Grandma's. Christmas is always huge--like I said, when everybody's there, it's over 50 people. I love it.

I'm not going home for Thanksgiving, which is pretty usual for me unless I'm living in Illinois at the time, like when I lived in Chicago, but usually I've had good friends nearby that I've celebrated with, and at least had one or two roommates I planned with.

This year, I won't be able to afford to go home for Christmas, either, so living alone, without any friends nearby, is really getting to me. I'm going to the bishop's for dinner tomorrow, and apparently there are going to be a lot of people there, and in the morning I'm going to a ward service project to take Thanksgiving dinner to families with family members in ICU, so I'll be busy tomorrow, but I'm still pretty sad that I don't have a spare $375 to fly home for Christmas--which, like I said, is the important one.

[The Jade Knight]

Hope you cheer up.  My Dad's side of the family is having a huge family-reunion thing (hosted by my dad) for Thanksgiving this year, but I'm missing that, too, and Ari and I are just having dinner with an Australian missionary couple.

Almost all of my family lives in Reno & Utah (except for one that lives in AZ), so we generally all get together for Thanksgiving, or at least most of us (this, again, all being past tense now that Grandma's gone).  Not getting to go home for Christmas is no fun, though.

[scAri]

(Brits, Canucks, and Aussies need not apply, you go to work, SUCKERS)

Actually, we just celebrate two months ahead of time, and then right after Halloween it's time to bring out the dancing Santas on the street! So on American Thanksgiving, we're a month into Christmas!

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

Your Thanksgiving is at once heretical and offensive.

And being a month into Christmas at this time is yet another reason WHY your apostate Thanksgiving in early Octoboer is just wrong.