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Would love to hear your traditions for my personal favorite holiday.....Thanksgiving. Seems like the media goes right from Halloween to Christmas in the blink of an eye...skipping right over thanksgiving. I have always loved thanksgiving...even as a kid....partially because it kicks off the wonderful holiday season...but also because it does not have the pressure or commercialism of Christmas. I am a teacher and will spend the next two weeks teaching my first graders about the history of thanksgiving and why it is important to America ...and also talking about traditions in their own families.
We love to decorate our house the day after Halloween....taking down the ghosts and goblins and replacing with turkeys and pilgrims...but leaving up the fall leaves and scarecrows since it is still an autumn holiday.
The week of thanksgiving my daughter and I make our traditional breadstick cornucopia and fill it with raw vegetables and munch on it all week with ranch dip. The day before thanksgiving we make butternut squash soup and eat it with a loaf of French bread all day long. On thanksgiving eve we light the fireplace, drink some hot cider, pop some popcorn and watch planes, trains and automobiles. The Macy's day parade is on all morning while we stuff the turkey followed by football games until night. It's just the three of us for dinner as our families are still up north...so it's a nice quiet meal...unlike a few weeks later when the families invade from up north for Christmas and New Years. After webcamming with the families we settle down wiith eggnog and pumpkin pie and watch a Charlie Brown thanksgiving and I always try to stay up to watch late night with David letterman...his thanksgiving show is always so funny. Friday lunch leftovers are followed by a long walk around the neighborhood and the traditional Friday after thanksgiving movie choice is Grumpy old men........
After all of that is completed.......the word "Christmas" is allowed in my household..lol.
Our daughter is now 15 and thankfully she still enjoys all of the above traditions we have been enjoying since even before she was born..I hope she never outgrows them and includes at least one of them when she has her own family in years to come...
Looking forward to hearing your thanksgiving traditions..
Small dish of fancy pasta ....a special uncommon pasta..with a uncommon meat.. shrimp-pork-spicy or mild. Just enough too zing the taste buds.. was my once a year treat back when.
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I also love Thanksgiving. Before I was married to my current football loving husband I always had the Twilight Zone marathon on the TV while cooking the meal. Family and friends would start showing up around 3PM to hang around and chat, eat dip, watch a bit of the marathon. Dinner would go on the table around 6:00 (we don't do early meals on holidays). After dinner I would have tons of help cleaning up and then we would all sit around and listen to music, eat pie and try not to explode from eating too much. Sometimes we would all have a Wii bowling competition. Some of the nieces and nephews are great singers and they would put on a little show. Fun times!
Now that I live away from my family I still cook a big turkey dinner, but it is much quieter in the house, except for the football noise on TV. This year my sister is coming and I can't wait!
Also, before the big meal, invest in an oven thermometer. It hangs from one of the racks, and allows you to determine whether the actual temperature in the oven matches what the dial says.
Our elder kid was convinced for months after she moved out that she was an awful cook, even though she had always cooked great meals at home, because anything she put in the oven came out burned on the outside and raw in the middle. Then we loaned her our oven thermometer and she discovered that the oven was somewhere from 75 to 100 degrees hotter than it should have been, no matter what setting she chose.
No way in the world you can cook successfully if your tools aren't working properly, so spend ten bucks on an oven thermometer and find out how hot your oven REALLY is when the dial says 325.
Also, before the big meal, invest in an oven thermometer. It hangs from one of the racks, and allows you to determine whether the actual temperature in the oven matches what the dial says.
Our elder kid was convinced for months after she moved out that she was an awful cook, even though she had always cooked great meals at home, because anything she put in the oven came out burned on the outside and raw in the middle. Then we loaned her our oven thermometer and she discovered that the oven was somewhere from 75 to 100 degrees hotter than it should have been, no matter what setting she chose.
No way in the world you can cook successfully if your tools aren't working properly, so spend ten bucks on an oven thermometer and find out how hot your oven REALLY is when the dial says 325.
The expensive meat thermometers would make a great Christmas gift stick it in the breast meat and get a real good reading.. along with the hanging thermometer
I've tried everything! What's wacky is that the bird's thermometer pops, I use my own thermometer to check and it shows cooked everywhere, but yet the inside is never darn cooked! And I cook the turkey for 6+ hours!!!! (It's usually a 24+ lb turkey) No stuffing either...just some celery stalks, onion & carrot.
Here's hoping I break a tradition this year. Thankfully my family has a decent sense of humor (and they fill up on my pigs-in-a-blanket apps. )
I've tried everything! What's wacky is that the bird's thermometer pops, I use my own thermometer to check and it shows cooked everywhere, but yet the inside is never darn cooked! And I cook the turkey for 6+ hours!!!! (It's usually a 24+ lb turkey) No stuffing either...just some celery stalks, onion & carrot.
Here's hoping I break a tradition this year.
ETA: I also have and use an oven thermometer.
Don't go by the pop-up thing..just a benchmark. Use a good meat prob thermometer stuck in the thickest part of the breast meat both sides.. you may have too rotate the pan the last hour.. No stuffing in side bird good way too get sick.. cook it on the stove...or in a separate pan from the bird. I have used a couple apples along with the onion and garlic and celery for inside bird..but don't eat just for flavoring.
Tin Man waved his magic wand and your bird will be excellent this year..
And to the topic of the thread, our Thanksgiving traditions aren't nearly as formalized as the OP's are. For one thing, we have family and friends gathering from across the state, and every year someone's work schedule has changed or someone has an emergency, so it's pretty near impossible to establish and maintain things like "We shall prepare X food exactly four days before Thanksgiving and all gather on Thanksgiving eve at 6:00 pm to discuss Y and Z as we eat it." That would lead to nervous breakdowns all round, starting with me, in a big hurry. So I guess you could say that our biggest tradition is flexibility.
We start sending out emails in October to ask family what their plans are, what other obligations they have, whether they prefer sourdough or cornbread stuffing this year, and which type of fruit pie to make (pumpkin and fudge-pecan are obligatory, but the third one varies between apple, cherry and blueberry). We check in with the football fans to find out when game-time is, and we check in with the split families (parents not living together, kids needing to spend part of the day with each parent) to find out what the other family's meal schedule is. We make sure our list of allergens, sensitivities and flavor preferences is up to date for everyone, and once we have all that pretty much defined, we start sketching out the menu and ingredient list.
One tradition for us is to use fresh ingredients to as much an extent is possible. We buy our turkey straight from the farmer who raised and slaughtered it; we make the bread or cornbread to dry out for stuffing, and we bake more bread to serve with dinner; we buy fresh pie pumpkins, roast them, puree and strain the pulp for our pies; cranberry relish, whether cooked or fresh, is made from whole berries we buy at our local Farmers' Market; other vegetables on the menu (sweet potatoes, squash, corn, potatoes, beets, onions, etc.) all come from the Farmers' Market; and pie fillings are made from scratch with fresh fruit, while pie crusts are mixed up and rolled by hand. So planning and logistics is another tradition for us; it's not easy for two people who work fulltime to pull off that much food prep.
At this point, a bit over two weeks before Thanksgiving, we have ordered our turkey, bought/roasted/pureed/frozen the pumpkin for the pies, and the bread for the stuffing has been made and is drying out. The weekend before the big day, I'll make up the cranberry relish (I think the consensus this year was for the cooked variety with ginger and oranges) and will be sure that the Farmers' Market shopping list fills in the final ingredients.
Things start getting interesting the Wednesday before. That's when out-of-town family starts trickling in, and of course each new carload must be greeted, hugged, exclaimed over, shown their bedrooms and settled in, between making pies and baking bread and mixing up stuffing. Supper on Wednesday evening is catch-as-catch-can, each of us snacking as we chatter, laugh, gossip and cook together, and we generally stay up pretty late. The younger nieces and nephews can be heard giggling in the upstairs spare bedroom as the adults sip wine and catch up on all the family news and doings from the past few months.
Then the great day itself dawns, and the whirlwind of preparations start anew. Dinner time varies based on all the variables noted above, so sometimes the turkey goes into the oven by 11:00 a.m. while other years it might be 2:30 or 3:00 before it goes in. This year, our younger kid probably won't arrive from the western edge of the state until Thursday morning because he works until 10 on Wednesday evening, so we'll have a reprise of the welcome/hugs/chatter/laughter of the previous evening.
Dinner will include good food, lots of lively conversation, awful puns, lame jokes, gales of laughter, plenty of teasing, and the warmth of love filling the room and our hearts. The rest of it is all just details, subject to change as people evolve and lives change and relationships wax and wane, but the fundamentals are always there.
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Still trying to figure it out.
Thankfully my family has a decent sense of humor (and they fill up on my pigs-in-a-blanket apps. 
)
