What do you do for Thanksgiving?

Being from Eastern Europe, Thanksgiving really isn’t in our tradition. Being Americanized, we do participate in the normal tradition such as Thanksgiving dinner with the big family. It’s less of a holiday where we experience thanks and more of a holiday like, “Well everyone else does it too, so let’s go buy a turkey.”

My grandma and my mother, they bake a turkey, all the mashed potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding is always there. The turkey is usually dry. But we usually stay in, invite all the family: aunts, uncles and cousins. They cook, we eat.

What is your favorite Thanksgiving memory?

My little brother didn’t really like the turkey. Like I said, it’s always dry. He’d gotten a lot, thinking he’d eat all of it. He ended up with a bunch of extras, so he left it on the ground for our dog, Buster. He came in the house with a (bunch of) turkey in his mouth and my grandma started yelling, “Why does the dog have turkey?” It was kind of funny.

Both sides of my family, we always get together and we cook two turkeys. One time, we were carrying the turkey and my mom or aunt, I can’t remember who, dropped the turkey. So, we didn’t eat that one.

I always try to include my and my boyfriend’s family, so I go in the early afternoon to my family and have Thanksgiving with them and then I drive a half hour to have a second thanksgiving with my boyfriend’s family. So we end up having two Thanksgivings in a day. It’s a lot of tryptophan.

What is your favorite memory of Thanksgiving?

One year we didn’t get to make Thanksgiving dinner. My grandma’s church donated all the Thanksgiving (food) to us, and we ate everything, but it tasted awful. And she just whipped out her sassy grandma self and said, “I don’t want anyone to remember me as if I cooked this meal. I didn’t and it’s gross and it’s not mine.”

Annie Page can be reached at [email protected] or @anniepaige3 on Twitter.