One of my favorite holidays is Thanksgiving. I love how it’s a day focused on spending time with family and friends and tables full of delicious food. Since I love the holiday so much I thought it would be fun to share some of our favorite Thanksgiving holiday traditions.
We always go to my mom and dad’s for Thanksgiving. My mom is an incredible cook and always makes the most wonderful dishes. Some of the classics that she makes every year include:
- Turkey
- Cranberries
- Stuffing
- Sweet Potato Casserole
- Green Bean Casserole
- Homemade Rolls
- Homemade Slow Cooker Apple Cider
She also always serves cheese and crackers, veggies and dip, and a variety of fruit.
Dave and I always make the mashed potatoes. We make them at our house and bring them with us. We put them in our slow cooker to keep them warm.
My sister and her daughters always make amazing pies: apple, pumpkin, and mincemeat.
Since Kora’s birthday is in December, we also always have her family birthday party on Thanksgiving. So we have a birthday cake, cupcakes, or brownies depending what she’s in the mood for. We usually serve the food buffet style so people don’t have to ask anyone to pass them more food and they can easily get up and get seconds. My mom pushes her tables together and we all sit together to eat. Even though we all live pretty close to each other, Thanksgiving dinner is always such a fun time to catch up with one another.
After dinner, dessert, and Kora opens her birthday gifts, the guys usually turn on a football game. Meanwhile my mom has the kids search her house for Santa’s button.
If you’ve never heard of this game it’s great to play with kids, even older ones. All our kids are now 17 and up and they still enjoy searching for the button! My mom hides it somewhere in her house and it’s just a small button so it can be pretty difficult to find. Once one of the kids finds it they generally run to another room and announce they’ve found it so no one catches on where it is. The other kids continue searching until they’ve all found it. Then the first person to find it gets to hide it again for either their cousins or my parents to find.
Once the kids have all found the button my mom gives them their Thanksgiving gifts. She gets them each a gift for Thanksgiving that is usually Christmas themed so they can have it before Christmas. We make them all pose for pictures with their gifts and then we are on to our next favorite tradition.
The family Christmas puzzle!
My mom buys a 500 piece Christmas puzzle every year and the kids spend the most time putting it together. All the adults will pop in and put in a few pieces, some will find many pieces and others are happy to just find one. We’ve found that the puzzle needs to be 500 pieces because with anything larger everyone runs out of steam.
After the puzzle is done we slide it onto a piece of poster board with the year written on it. Then everyone who put a piece in the puzzle, signs their name around the poster board. Some write their name in a serious straightforward way and others write it in a lighthearted comical way. This was something my parents started with the kids when they were really little and we all look forward to it every year.
Over the next day or two, my parents will then use puzzle glue on the puzzle and not only glue it together but also glue it to the poster board. They then hang all the puzzles up in the their stairwell along the walls. It’s fun looking at all the puzzles we’ve all worked on together over the years and also seeing all the different signatures.
After that we all relax and chit chat for the rest of the evening. We may play a game but it just depends how tired everyone is at this point.
Thanksgiving is always such a fun family holiday that I always look forward to every year. I love our family traditions and I’m already counting down the days to the delicious food, fun family time, puzzles and games and of course Kora’s birthday celebration!
