Fun Thanksgiving traditions?

[ChristusG]

Our family has lots of Christmas traditions, but not really any Thanksgiving ones. What does your family do for fun and memories on Thanksgiving? Make a craft? Do something special to share what you are thankful for? Please share, I need ideas!

[Jennifer in MI]

We spend the night at our church so that we can watch American's Thanksgiving Parade go by the front of our church on Thanksgiving! It's awesome! We sit on the heaters at the front of our church and watch the parade. Love it!

 

Then, we drive to my parent's house and have dinner.

 

Probably not what you were looking for, but it's what we do!!

[Imprimis]

Our family has lots of Christmas traditions, but not really any Thanksgiving ones. What does your family do for fun and memories on Thanksgiving? Make a craft? Do something special to share what you are thankful for? Please share, I need ideas!

 

My children always help me prepare the stuffing the night before Thanksgiving (toasting bread and tearing it into pieces).

 

On Thanksgiving Day, we all watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade together while the turkey is in the oven. We have hot chocolate and a special breakfast...sometimes oven French toast, but, always something we don't have on a regular basis.

 

In the past, I have had my kids make these hand turkeys.

[Tohru]

My ds makes a fancy restaurant style menu with elaborate descriptions of each entree or dish. Usually he types it into Word and uses different fonts. It's a lot of fun for all of us to read what he comes up with.

If you wanted, because your LOs are a bit younger, maybe they could give descriptions that you could type them up or make a menu with pictures?

[helena]

My family makes tamales!

:drool5:

We don't do it on the actual day of Thanksgiving, but that weekend. The weekend before, we'll go to my aunts to experiment with sauces.

[Julie in AZ]

We enjoy a Pilgrim dinner before Thanksgiving, eating with similar manners as the Pilgrims. The dc have to stand. We eat with our hands and use long napkins to grab hot food. The dc recite Psalm 100.

 

I like the tradition of using a fabric pen to write what you are thankful for on small section of a tablecloth then adding to and using the tablecloth every year.

 

We take communion together as a family on Thanksgiving.

 

One of my favorite traditions is going drugstore sale shopping with a friend at 7am then taking her out to breakfast for her birthday, just the two of us. ;)

[Starr]

One year we traced everyone's hand, cut it out, and put their name on it. Then we passed them around and everyone wrote something nice that they thought about that person. Or why they were thankful for them. After dinner we read them and made them into a wreath for the wall.

[eternalknot]

We hit the park and play - football, kickball, soccer. Just depends. I have 100+ relatives show, though, and we're in a tropical climate. If we were somewhere cold, I'd totally skip that and offer to stay home on K.P.!

 

Kids make nametags for everyone. We have 100+ relatives over the course of the day, and about 60 for the main meal. Definitely not enough tables for everyone, so placecards were out (that's what we did when I was a kid - placecards, but we were much smaller back then!) instead the kids use markers and stickers to give everyone an adhesive nametag. We all know each other, it just gives them something to do. If we were really small, I think it'd be fun to have a placecard craft involving more than markers and stickers.