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.