I am convinced that every family has its own particular set of strange traditions, inevitable crises, and other oddities that surface at Thanksgiving. They’re the best part of the holiday, aren’t they? Here, a selected list of ours:
- Every year, my mother makes a wild rice dish. Every year she forgets to add raisins. Every year she forgets to set it out on the buffet with the other sides. Every year, she laments that no one ate it. EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was a comedy bit. “I forgot to put out the rice!” “No shit, that has never happened before!”
- I add salt to the potatoes in secret. I actually post John as a lookout at the kitchen door and do it as fast as possible so no one will see me do it. Because if they saw me, they would not eat the potatoes. Except you know how mashed potatoes taste without salt? LIKE PASTE.
- Forty-seven half-filled water glasses all over the house, with at least three people an hour asking “is this one mine?”
- Three kinds of cranberry sauce for a family of five.
- Similarly, three kinds of potatoes.
- Also, three kinds of stuffing.
- No, I’m not exaggerating. We are picky.
- The once-a-year, only-at-Thanksgiving, musical version of grace before the meal. Sung off key. At different tempos. By two people who know the words, one who kind of does, and two who just blatantly make it up.
- Dream Whip. I know. God, I know. If I could change that one, I would.
- And finally, my personal favorite because it is SO RIDICULOUS and yet SO US, we have got to be the only family on earth who every year has to make a trip to the grocery store on Thanksgiving day to buy emergency lunch provisions including, I SWEAR TO GOD, sliced turkey for sandwiches. Because, you know, we’re not going to have any of that lying around the house in a few hours or anything.
So yeah, mine was great. How was yours?
Ha ha ha! I love your list! Especially the first item. That sounds like something my mother or her mom would do.
As I’ve been reading blog posts this weekend I have realized how different everyone’s Thanksgiving traditions are. It’s really interesting to see other dishes I’ve never even heard of. Ours was also great. I’m very pleased with the way everything turned out!
I love this. I’m totally starting a forgetting-the-wild-rice tradition of my own next year!
Ha! I wish we had traditions like this. Our traditions are mostly someone yelling and then someone getting upset.
This year I got yelled at for teasing the cat! Good times!
This list is hilarious. The one about everyone mixing up their water glasses cracks me up. Sounds like it’s time to invest in some of those little glass marker things. They’re usually used for wine glasses but I don’t see why they couldn’t be used for water glasses too.
i had to look up dream whip. it’s.. wow
we’re not allowed to bring any new food into the house on the Weds before thanksgiving or on Thanksgiving itself because my mom needs EVERY SQUARE INCH of the refridgerator for the food she’s in the middle of making for all of us…
Are you a member of my family? I think you must be because that description of your mother and the wild rice IS SO MY MOTHER!!! Every year for a holiday she would forget to put out the same dish. Every year at Christmas she would lose someone’s gift. Oh this made me laugh so hard!
This post made me smile. Mostly to know that every family is a little weird in their own way. One of our oddities is there is this pearl onion dish that everyone bitches about making (peeling that many onions is no small feat) but everyone insists we have on the table. And this year, a new oddity. My dad makes a toast and Sweets’ dad says grace. Drink. Pray. In that order.
Two years in a row, my Mom forgot to add the eggs to her pumpkin pie – and didn’t realize it until the pie was coming out of the oven. Note: pouring scrabbled eggs into boiling hot pumpkin pie filling is not a good idea….