Somehow I'm always the one making the stuffing for Thankgiving dinner and am a sucker just to make the delicious Stovetop stuff from the box, but this year I wanna try my hand at homemade! :o

We always all get together at my dad's around lunch time -- which has really sucked the last few years because that's naptime for my youngest and everyone else refuses to move the time. But anyway. We just sit around, talk, and eat. Obviously, it's the being together that's the important part (even with a cranky toddler).

I love to make orange jello fruit salad (recipe here: https://www.meatloafandmelodrama.com/orange-jello-fruit-salad/ )! Not really a stereotypical Thanksgiving recipe, but it works!

We have dinner at my in-laws with everyone. We watch the Macys thanksgiving day parade in the morning. And My husband watches the football game (regardless of whether the Patriots are playing or not) with his father, brother, sisters and his brothers in law. My mother in law usually has everyone stringing cranberries and popcorn together with a needle and thread to drape over their Christmas tree when they put it up.

I'm going to share my deceased Grandmother's green jello salad. She always made it for our Thanksgiving every year since I was a kid and I looked forward to it every year! Now I always make it to bring to my in-laws house for Thanksgiving because it just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without it!

I'm from England and don't celebrate Thanksgiving, but my favourite autumn tradition is buying pumpkin spice syrup! My husband and I make pumpkin spice lattes in the morning. We also decorate the house with autumn-themed decor and have lots of stews! My husband also makes pumpkin pie for Halloween! Finding American pumpkin purée for the pie is hard... 😅

I love cooking and one of my favourites is this recipe for the simple roast potato! I swear they turn out amazing, pair with a Yorkshire pudding and gravy and it's divine. 🤌

Roast Potatoes Recipe

Bump!

No thanksgiving here down under, but my favourite winter tradition is the Winter Lights Festival at a tiny little mountain town named Swifts Creek. The whole night is lit up with art and lanterns and fairy lights, with twilight markets etc. It truly is magical.

My favourite go-to Winter Recipe is a secret family beef and vegetable soup. Here is the closest thing I can find:

https://www.thespruceeats.com/hearty-old-fashioned-vegetable-beef-soup-3051395

This thing takes hours and hours to cook, and is best served with thick, crusty bread. My Nana cooks it three or four times throughout Winter, and I can never quite do it as well as she does. 

I used to love waking up early and watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade followed by the National Dog Show, then we would all go to a relative's house for late lunch/early dinner with all the fixings. Uncles would watch the football game and drink, Aunts would all sit around the table chatting away and also drink haha, then us kids would be running a muck before being tossed outside to cause more chaos if the weather wasn't freezing by then. xD

The past few years have been a small get together with the in-laws and have dinner. Then after dinner take a short drive to the beach and go for a walk. It's honestly the best time to go too since it's "colder out", not as many people around, and I can happily walk in the surf up to my knees without a care to the world. Yes the water is cold, but I don't care, haha! Small moments of peace is worth it!

I've been assigned the Green Bean Casserole maker, and so far hasn't let anyone down with it yet! xD

We get together at my grandmas house every thanksgiving and we sit around and talk and play board games and have a delicious meal.

I always look forward to getting to eat stuffing, I don't really know what it is about the stuffing, but it's definitely one of my favourite parts about thanksgiving and also getting to eat pumpkin pie. 

When I was a kid, at Hallowe'en, we would carve turnips into Jack-o-Lanterns (a tough job), use black plastic bin bags for costumes and wear thin plastic masks that got wet from breath condensation, cracked easily so scratched your face, and if you stuck your tongue tip out the mouth hole, you risked getting it cut. They were held on your head by a thin elastic connected to the mask by a staple at each end.
We would go around the houses in the cul-de-sac (of 6 houses) and our neighbours would give us sweets or money. This was in the '80s and if you got 10p or 20p it was great, but if you got 50p you thought you were rich!

There were indoor fireworks which were lit on a saucer on the kitchen table and oozed black...stuff. There were sparklers, Catherine Wheels and Roman Candles for outside; we ducked for apples in a large tub of water, tried to bite apples hanging from string, and ate toffee apples and apple pie which had a 20p coin baked into it.

Thanksgiving really wasn't a big thing in our family, like we celebrated and we got together but for that holiday I don't have many like...traditions? it's just not such a big deal. 

I'm not a Christmas person but one of my happier memories was when my Uncle Danny would take me and all my cousins packed in his beat up Ford Pinto out on Christmas Eve to "look for Rudolph" (Rudolph was just a radio tower with a blinking red light lmao) but we believed it. There were a few short years our family got together and we loved each other deeply. My cousins and I used to be very close. I haven't seen any of them in years now, but we had pretty good times as kids.