What was Thanksgiving like as a child?

47 comments

1. Thanksgiving is awesome. My favorite “family” holiday.

   As a kid, it was less awesome than Christmas… because you’re not getting any presents and the holiday isn’t really focused on you. It’s more of an adult holiday… but, it’s still fun. Who doesn’t love eating great food and watching football?

2. It was easily the worst holiday as a kid. No presents, no candy, just eating a lot of boring grown up food.

   As an adult, I like it a lot better.

3. It was kind of better than Christmas in that my entire family (cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.) got together for a giant meal. At some point we stopped doing that when all of us kids started having kids of our own. Christmas was pretty much an immediate family only event for my family.

4. Thanksgiving was always fun, the drive to go see family was the boring part. It’s similar to christmas, just without the gifts and a bigger emphasis on the food. It’s one of my favorite holidays to this day.

5. Not really Christmas like, just a lot of food to look forward to.

6. It’s not really kid-focused so it can be boring for a child. It’s mostly just grown-ups sitting around talking about grown-up stuff. I would usually just say hi to whatever friends or family came to visit and then go back to my room and play video games until it was time to eat. If there were other kids my age there we might go play or something.

   As an adult its awesome. Hang out, drink, eat tons of delicious food.

7. Lots of family. Sleeping on cots or on the floor. One Thanksgiving during my childhood stands out. All my dad’s siblings and 3 of 4 families showed up at my grandparents’ house, plus my great-grandmother was still alive. 19 people were stuffed into a 150-year-old house with one bathroom. I wouldn’t like it now, but when I was 8, it was hilarious.

8. I enjoyed it… in the morning we would make a big breakfast and then watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in Manhattan on tv. Later in the day our extended family would come over and we would have a big Thanksgiving dinner (earlier than a normal dinner) and hang out. Certainly not as fun as Christmas for a kid, but I still looked forward to it.

9. A lot of family would gather at my grandmother’s house, so I always had a lot of fun playing with cousins and gorging on my grandmother’s amazing cooking. Good times!

   Man I miss my grandmother’s.

10. My Thanksgiving has been the same for as long as I can remember – going to my great aunt and uncle’s for a big meal and then sitting around with family until the sun set.

    When I was a kid it was pretty boring, but we’d always spend part of the day circling the Christmas gifts we wanted in catalogs, and that was a lot of fun (those were the days).

    These days I like Thanksgiving a lot more. I’m very lucky to still have my great aunt and uncle and they still cook up a storm every year. When they’re gone, Thanksgiving will probably fall to me and my wife, and I guarantee you that no Thanksgiving meal we put together will stand up to what they do every year.

11. Not Christmas-like because you don’t get presence but still a fun day. You get to watch football (American football, obviously; Thanksgiving NFL games are a longstanding tradition) and then eat a ton of food. I always liked it growing up. We didn’t do much with extended family though because they were all in another country, so it was usually just my parents and brother.

12. I am a food person, so I loved thanksgiving, because food. My sister and I would eat as much as we could and play with our cousins, or when gatherings got a little smaller, go watch Disney movies and pass out.

    Loved it. Still love it.

13. Both of my grandma’s were farm ladies and Thanksgiving was spectacular. The usual suspects were turkey, dressing(google thanksgiving dressing), summer corn from the freezer, creamed lima beans, peas and carrots, mashed potatoes, baked mac and cheese, gravy, baked sweet potatoes, cheese and raw veggie trays, green beans and ham, dinner rolls, cranberry sauce and lots of homemade pies(pumpkin pie, apple, strawberry and rhubarb etc). Bonus from year to year was baked duck or fried rabbit. Usually 30 or more people, best childhood memories.

    [Bonus The Irish try thanksgiving pies from America](https://youtu.be/l0X4rgL3asc)

14. I loved it as a kid! My cousins came over and we played all day and all night and there was lots of good food and everyone was happy and having fun.

    I always loved it even more than Christmas!

15. For my family, Thanksgiving was kind of like Christmas without the presents. I’d look forward to seeing my cousins at the big family dinner and we’d play for hours.

16. In my family, if you are a kid or a man, it’s fun. The women get stuck cooking for days and cleaning for hours.

    Now that I’m the one ‘In charge’ (my parents are too old to do a whole thing and my kids don’t care that much), I buy the boxed dinner for 10 from the local cafeteria. Everything comes pre cooked and you just have to heat it up. Turkey breast – not a whole bird.

    We get to spend time together and the holiday doesn’t take over your life.

17. I’ve always disliked Thanksgiving because its almost always with the boring side of my family. While my dads side of the family are the fun ones who I think my siblings and I relate to more, they live far away so we only see them a few times a year. My moms side is much more local, so we see them way more often but they just share very different interests. They are not big on sports, or drinking really, much more intellectuals and into topics that I just don’t want to discuss over thanksgiving dinner. Kind of a pretentious group focused on academia more than anything else. And don’t get my wrong, there intelligence is impressive and I enjoy spending time talking about deeper and more intellectual topics in my life from time to time, however it just doesn’t feel familial to me. I would much rather have a thanksgiving with family, drinking beer, watching football while munching on a fried turkey leg on a paper plate, instead of sitting in a fancy dinning room discussing todays political climate.

    This made it feel much more like a boring chore as a kid and honestly still does as an adult. Christmas on the other hand was amazing and always my favorite holiday because we did it with immediate family only, so it felt more like a true family holiday to me.

18. Thanksgiving was always a bigger deal in my family, but I thought it was boring. We had food I didn’t like (except the stuffing & pumpkin pie, I’ve loved those since I was a kid) and there were no presents. Worst of all, when family members came from out of town & filled up the dining room table, we kids were consigned to the “kids table.”

    Eating at the kids table always felt like we were being punished for something, excluded from the company of our parents, aunts & uncles, forced to sit next to cousins we barely knew. I *hated* eating at the kids table.

    Now, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I don’t have any kids, but I wouldn’t have had them sit at the kid’s table if I did.

    I love the classic Thanksgiving food: roasted turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, etc. I hated most of that when I was a kid, but I love cooking all of that for my family now and I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it, even if I do say so myself. I even make the cranberry sauce from scratch these days! My mom always got the stuff in the can. Home-made is so much better! 🙂

19. Fun. My family hosted so yes we did have to clean. But it was always nice seeing aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents, family friends. We would have the traditional food plus Filipino favorites. And we got the lion’s share of leftovers.

    It was a little bit like a pot luck because of how much food we had.

    Appetizer: mixed nuts, spinach dip and crackers, vegetable tray

    American food: turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, stuffing, green beans, potato salad, macaroni salad, ambrosia salad, regular salad

    Filipino food: lumpia, chicken and long rice, adobo, rice

    Dessert: pies (three or four), Cool Whip, ice cream, no-bake oatmeal cookies

20. For me, it was very much a fun Christmas like experience. I have a big extended family that mostly lives in the same area and gets along very well, so lots of people (like 30+) would gather at someone’s house and we would eat GREAT food and just hang out together. For a long time I was the youngest in my extended family so it was also a good day to get lots of attention. I have great adult thanksgiving traditions going now, but I do miss Thanksgivings from my childhood.

21. I loved it as a child. Everyone went to my aunt’s house (it was huge on a few acres of land) and spent the whole day cooking there. Men outside on the grill, women inside on side dishes and dessert.

    The kids were off in the woods doing things like exploring the barns or shooting coke cans with a BB gun or just playing with whatever farm animals my uncle had acquired that year.

    As an adult it’s much less fun. A lot of family has either moved or died, so now it’s immediate family and we just do a scaled down meal and yard work afterwards.

22. Uhhhh…our Thanksgivings were more … Colorful than most I guess.

    First of all, our whole extended family always gathers for Easter, 4th of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas. So it’s like 60 people easy.

    We always did Thanksgiving at the “old family place,” which is the ancestral home, the land our people basically stole right out from under the Indians, no middlemen involved. We been there since Queen Elizabeth and shit.

    The old family place is not fancy. I have looked, and although we fought on the wrong-ass side of the civil war, apparently we never used captive labor (that’s “slaves” to you and me). Anyway, I don’t have any reason to think we were all that high-minded, probably we were just not very adept farmers and never could afford enslaved labor. Really don’t know.

    So Thanksgiving was always at that spot, and although they put plumbing in it in the 80s, it wasn’t ever up to a bunch of cats shitting in there all at once, so all the adult men and children had to use the outhouse. That was the rule. It got pretty rank by EOD.

    After the big meal, we all would go walk to the old family graveyard. In addition to the old maters and paters of the family lineage, there were two graves marked “Yankee.” These were two fellas who were walking home from the war, and had caught pneumonia. My great grandfather caught sight of one of them trying to bury his friend with his hands, and took him into the house, and tried to nurse him back to health while assigning his sons to dig a proper grave for his buddy. The other one didn’t make it so they dug two graves. The fella was so sick, they never got names out of him, so the graves both just say “Yankee.”

    Then after looking at the graveyard we all go target shooting in the woods. Everybody brings their new guns to show them off. This is not a big thing with my part of the family, but it is hilarious and we go along with it because it’s fun.

23. If your from a bigger family there is usually an adult table consisting of your grandparents, your parents and your aunts and uncles and a kids table of your siblings and cousins.

    To me Thanksgiving was always just a big meal for the whole family with some seasonal dishes that you might not have year.

    How fun it is as a child is pretty much determined by how much you get along with your cousins. Otherwise it can be pretty boring.

    As an adult it’s fun to catch up with my family members, have a few beers, and watch both the Lions and Cowboys lose

24. It was super fun, tons of food the whole family gets together and just spends time. I loved it!

25. It was always my favorite holiday as a kid.

    We always went into the city for the Macy’s parade then went to my grandmother’s house for food and football.

26. As a child it is nothing like Christmas, no presents, just a big dinner with lots of pies. It was usually my immediate family and both sets of grandparents. We only had football on if it was at grandma’s house, my parents didn’t get TV until I was out of the house. Not a chore for the kids, but I suppose the women doing all the cooking and baking thought it was.

27. We didn’t live near my extended family, so we always got together with about 4 other families with kids the same age who were in the same boat. We did a potluck dinner and the kids ran around playing and watching football while the moms socialized while drinking wine and putting together the spread. The dads would mostly be watching the game while poorly supervising the kids. After dinner we played games like Password or Scattergories until we all got tired and went home. It was a pretty good time. Easter was the same thing with the same group, only add in an egg hunt

28. You all sit watch the true football and eat a bs amount of food it’s amazing

29. From what I understand the U.K. has a lot of traditional Christmas foods, including turkey and stuffing, that are associated with Thanksgiving in the United States. If that’s correct, you can just take that part of the U.K. Christmas and move it to November. Because there are no presents involved there’s a lot more emphasis on the food at Thanksgiving, though.

30. It was a fun gathering of the family with a big meal, basically Christmas without the presents and more food.

31. All I remember is the work. Literally the females cooking for up to three days before Thanksgiving, making pies and assorted deserts, aspics, snacks. Getting up at 4-5am on Thanksgiving to start the turkey. Making sure all of the good china and Sterling silverware was polished.

    Then we ate for about 30-45 minutes. The men retired to either nap or watch sports and we cleaned and put away everything. Several hours. By the time we were finished, the men had roused and were demanding sandwiches.

    I love the idealism behind Thanksgiving, but in my experience, it was miserable.

32. We all went to Thanksgiving at my aunt’s house. We had a separate table away from the adults and we would trade riddles and jokes and stories while we ate and then consume a concerning amount of pecan and pumpkin pie and go swimming in the backyard. We loved it.

    Before Thanksgiving we’d all meet at my grandmother’s house and the kids would scoop the insides out of orange halves so we could juice the orange and stuff the peel w baked sweet potato, cinnamon, and marshmallows. That was our only job.

33. So much fun. We always had a horde of cousins and we always got into some kind of mischief before dinner.

34. It was fun for me! my entire family kinda used it as an excuse to get together, my mom and aunts would make traditional Mexican food and we always used thanksgiving to do the secret santa raffle

35. I loved Thanksgiving. I can’t ever remember not enjoying it. It was a day off from school on a Thursday. We would go to visit relatives and play with our cousins who lived in different states. We always watched football which I enjoyed even as a kid. The smells wafting from the kitchen were heavenly. If the kids went in there we’d get chased out. We had the “kids’ table” which we preferred at the younger age because we could eat our food and go play some more. It wasn’t boring grown-ups talking all night. And there were so many desserts!

36. It was a gathering of 30+ people at my grandmother’s house, all relatives or close family friends.

    Once everyone arrived and the food was ready, someone would say a blessing. Some years we would all go around and tell what we are thankful for.After that we would line up and get our food buffet-style, then sit at one of the tables. The dining room table was reserved for the oldest adults. Younger adults and kids ended up sitting at card tables, picnic tables, etc.

    After round 1 of Thanksgiving dinner, we would hang out for a few hours. People would watch football, look through the Black Friday ads (paper ads — this was pre-internet), or just talk and enjoy each other’s company. Kids would play outside with almost no supervision. Eventually we would all get hungry again and have a second round of Thanksgiving dinner. Leftovers would be packed up and distributed, and we would all go home.

    I know some people get out their nice dishes for Thanksgiving, but we were more of a “paper plates and solo cups” type of family. The variety of delicious food was impressive — turkey, ham, duck, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, deviled eggs, green bean casserole, sweet potato casserole, corn casserole, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, macaroni and cheese, black eyed peas, corn muffins, dinner rolls, Watergate salad, pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, chocolate pie, chocolate cake, sugar cookies, etc. To drink we had sweet tea, lemonade, and soda. There was no alcohol served because we had a recovering alcoholic in the family.

    It was fun, chaotic, and some of the best memories of my childhood.

37. As a kid I LOVED Thanksgiving so much. It was the one day of the year the entire family got together. We’d all cook the food together, then eat then after we’d watch football, play games, and plan for Christmas. I really miss it. Now I haven’t seen anyone in years let alone get together like that

38. I think thanksgiving is awesome as a kid. You have the parade on TV in the morning, then football, so much yummy food, and family and the house smells soooo good!

39. I always felt like it was a chore, most of my cousins aren’t my age, they are much younger then me. The only time I liked Thanksgiving is when I got to see my second cousins which are all my age.

40. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s like Christmas without the pressure of presents.

41. Christmas was much more focused on my immediate family with just us 6 and maybe a grandparent that came to visit. Thanksgiving had a broader scope. We saw aunts, uncles and cousins gathering at one house or another each year with 20-30 people. After dinner all the cousins would play a big game of hide and seek.

42. Hated the holidays. Still do. It was just a reason for my father to get hammered and knock us around..

43. Unfortunately for me, I wish I had memorable Thanksgivings growing up as it was a holiday I should have ended up liking but, I just genuinely always found it be a massive bore for me as we always held it at one of my aunt’s houses. I just never cared much for it or the food. I only ever really ate dinner rolls and later years would add Pumpkin Pie to that. It only started to be enjoyable when my parents decided to hold it at our home and a do a nontraditional one with food from their home country. Honestly, how should have been done with us.

44. The best memories of my life. We started in 1974 as the “Exiles from Minnesota”. It was the three families on my Dad’s side that lived closest to each other in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin getting together because it was too far to drive to Minnesota for the weekend. Over the years we would have great-aunts and uncles from Dad’s father’s side come, other cousins from his mother’s side if they were down for a visit, but the three families have been the core. It used to rotate houses: every third year one of us would host. Dinner, watch the Lions lose, eat more, play outside, go for a walk, eat, go bowling, then bed: sleeping in bags on the family room floor. Next morning: huge breakfast with Tiger Eggs, then being dragged to the mall for Christmas shopping. When we got older – and bigger- the out of towners would get a room at the Ramada or Holiday Inn and we’d go swimming the next day after the mall. As we grew up and started getting married, having kids the crowd exploded in size. But, the kids all have many of the same memories. The three hostesses are all now in their 80s and the cousins are hosting. We even revived beanbag chair races sown the stairs. (More thrilling and dangerous at 50 than at 5)

45. My dad has five brothers and sisters so for Thanksgiving every year they all came to my grandmother’s house. That’s 14 adults and 15 children. Most of my aunts and uncles lived nearby but the five of us would always sleep at Grandma’s house or sleep over with one of our cousins.

    This was the 1980’s so we didn’t have phones or a computer or much in the way of video games. I do remember the year our cousins brought the Nintendo was a very big deal. My grandmother found the Nintendo hilarious. I can still hear her laugh as we all took turns playing Mario. Usually we played outdoors. We had enough to play some really epic games of tag, hide and seek, cops and robbers or football.

    My grandfather built a huge table so the entire family of 25-30 people could sit together. It was in a sun room off the kitchen/dining area. The kitchen and dining room would be set up buffet style and we’d fill our plate and then go outside to the sun room to eat all together.

    Afterwards the men would retire to the living room to watch football, the kids would play outside and the women would clean the kitchen. It’s not a big job with 7 ladies doing it and they always seemed to have fun.

    Once the kitchen was clean it was time for dessert! Grandma would make two kinds of cake, 10 pies mostly pumpkin but fruit also or a cobbler of some kind, and a tray of banana pudding big enough to swim in.

    Those of us staying at grandma’s would eat leftovers for the next two or three days or until we got tired of turkey and ham and went out for Mexican or Chinese food. My mom and my aunts and my grandmother usually went Black Friday shopping.

    I miss those days.

46. Fun as hell, Black Friday at midnight too so could pick out gifts n shit. Great times

47. It was like any other family dinner except you had to eat turkey instead of something yummy.