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Thanksgiving Week

Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday. I’ve always celebrated a Thanksgiving week as opposed to a Thanksgiving Day.

This year, it started with an all-nighter of cooking in the kitchen of Unity House for the Friends-giving of Sherwood. The Resident Advisors held a Friendsgiving dinner in the lounge consisting of lumpy mashed potatoes (I couldn’t find a proper masher), Kraft mac and cheese, and sliced turkey meat from the deli counter at Giant. The food wasn’t amazing but, the company was.

Then the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I had another Friendsgiving with some old high school friends. We sat around for hours and ate an unreal amount of pie and talked about what we don’t miss about high school.

The main event of Thanksgiving dinner is always a huge production in my house.  My Mom spends days prepping the house for company. In our house, “The door is always open”. (We’re like a less trusting version of the Tanner family from Full House – our door is only open figuratively and both of my parents are still alive). We usually have anywhere from 23-38 guests, in addition to my family of five, joining us for Thanksgiving dinner. We have first cousins, second cousins, third cousin, aunt and uncles, college friends, exchange students, exercise buddies, neighbors, coworkers, stray pets – if you can name it, we have more than likely had them over for Thanksgiving dinner.

This year our guest of honor was a foreign exchange student who was staying with my cousins in Colorado for six months. She’s visiting from Sydney, Australia. We grilled her on all things Australian then she grilled us on all things Thanksgiving. Introducing her to all of our family’s weird Thanksgiving traditions was probably my favorite part about this Thanksgiving.

The cousins after the final round of the Thanksgiving Day Tournament. Reigning Champion Jordon with his certificate (matching crown - not pictured)
The cousins after the final round of the Thanksgiving Day Tournament. Reigning Champion Jordon with his certificate (matching crown – not pictured)

My family is very competitive, so every year we have a Thanksgiving Day tournament. This year in addition to playing Pit and Apples to Apples, we added cup pong and bowling. As the reigning Thanksgiving champion from last year (it says so in my Instagram bio, so you know it’s true), I got to start the tournament off. My sister designed the brackets and we had guest judges for each game. After a tie in nearly every competition, I passed the crown to Jordan as reigning Thanksgiving Day champion.

After the tournament we squeezed into the dining room and living room (we can’t all fit in the dining room) and sat down to eat. Before we can get our food, we go around the entire table and everyone has to say what they’re thankful for. This year there was an extensive amount of people who were thankful for family, food, and Steve Irwin. I think for that we can thank our guest of honor.

After dinner we ate dessert and watched my two grandmothers yelling at each other from their seats across the family room because neither can hear what the other one is saying.

“I’m getting old.”

“You’re feeling cold? Get a quilt.”

“I’m Irish not Scottish. We don’t have kilts.”

 

Thanksgiving will forever be my favorite holiday