This year for the first time, no in-laws will be visiting. So it will just be me, my sweetie, and the five cats.
We’ll probably still do a turkey (the small ones taste the best anyway), dressing (maybe only a half batch), and a pie. There will probably be a green vegetable, too. It’s a lot of food, but we can eat on it all week.
are you really asking this? I mean, I understand if the people, food, and activities involved make it not enjoyable for you specifically, but you do realize that getting together with friends/relatives (some of whom you might not see regularly) for a special meal is something many others DO enjoy right?
My immediate family are all deceased.
I have cousins that I enjoy spending time with, especially Thanksgiving. I drive to Virginia and spend a long weekend/week.
It’s the only holiday that I can tolerate.
In recent years I have actually enjoyed it.
So it does A LOT for me.
Christmas is just far too sad for me.
Last year, I created a Thanksgiving-themed bingo card to pass the time and cope with the bull during the annual gathering. It actually made it a lot better and more fun to endure. If any of you have to tolerate shitty family members this year, I recommend trying it out.
Thanksgiving is complicated for me. Little preface, I and my wife live in the same town with her parents, and a large contingent of her extended family, most of which is getting noticeably elderly if still mostly independent. My wife and I are pretty liberal (her more than me ), and there’s another set of local cousins who are liberal leaning independents, and the rest are pretty conservative, although relatively few of them are frothing MAGA types. So, ideally, I’d suggest this holiday as the one where we visit MY family for the Holiday, but even so, that’s something we’ve only done maybe twice in 20 years. Not that them being 600+ miles away at closest and seasonal travel difficulties isn’t a huge factor as well, but…
Thanksgiving is my Mother-in-law’s holiday. It’s the one she hosts at her house, with everyone bringing in one or more dishes, while she provides turkey and fixins. Christmas Eve is at a local uncle-in-law’s house, and a number of other holidays occur at other extended family locations. But ditching MiL’s holiday? Rough. Very rough.
So, despite the unspeakable subtle (or not) gloating over Trump, we’re going. But… most of the youngest generation is now all off to college, or well past that (like my wife and I) - and so, things seem to end a bit sooner, as everyone tends to want to get home before it gets dark (which happens around 4pm with the mountains and the time of year). And each year, I push a bit to leave earlier. Ideally, we’d be out by 2pm, but I know that won’t happen, but if I can keep it to 11am to 3pm or so, I’ll grit my teeth and manage just as I do every year when some of the more devout Christians say grace and invoke Jesus and not just God as a more diplomatic person might do.
This is quite similar to what I do. Chicken, stuffing, mashed spuds, gravy, green beans or another green veg as preferred, and I will make a pumpkin pie, too. None of it is hard, and while there are quite a lot of leftovers, I convert much of it into soup or other reconfigurations for meals down the road.
Back when I celebrated with family, I did the whole meal with turkey for everyone and it was much more elaborate: Many more side dishes, more pies and other desserts. Doing a solo chicken with fixin’s for just me is a doddle.
My Trumpy parents moved further away to Trumpy Arizona and I no longer feel obliged to spend the holiday with them. I’m sure they prefer the company of like-minded people to that of their Librul daughter, so that works out.
Different people have different traditions & I get that but I like Thanksgiving dinner, damnit! Keep your family’s crazy Thanksgiving brunch. It’s just wrong!
I think it’s a combination of things, lots of 80+ old family members, and ones who want to get home and watch football, and the rest.
It used to be a nearly all day affair, noon to 8pm, with Thanksgiving dinner served around 4pm, rather than 12 noon to 1 pm.
A big advantage to this though (not to crap on your traditions or preferences) is that fewer people are coming over already having had a few, and drinking for 4-5 hours becoming less restrained the whole time!
That combined with the (thankful to me at least) passing of some of the really unpleasant members who fell into the ‘crazy uncle’ trope regardless of gender…
3-5 holidays a year with extended family kept to 4 hours or so? I can manage.
My dad is in his nineties, and in failing health. I’ll take any holiday opportunity to spend time with him.
Fortunately we’re all Democrats in our family, so political arguments are kept to a minimum.
Will the cats get some turkey?
For the past 30+ years, my wife and I have rotated what we do on Thanksgiving, alternating each year between:
Developments in recent months have begun to change this:
Thanksgiving is just two weeks away, and we still have no idea what we’re going to be doing for it.
I wasn’t invited by the family, my daughter extended a ‘you can come along with us’. I still haven’t met any of them.
It’s a biggish meal every dinner time here.
My Sister and couple of her daughters have come in the recent past, she had a few health problems recently.
Her grown daughters are taking over their celebrations this year.
My brother drives through on his way to South Louisiana. But he never stays long enough to eat.
It will be us guys. A couple deer camp hangers-on.
My diet can’t really change amounts, or load up on desserts. Eh, whatever. As long as the kids are happy.
We used to have fairly large Thanksgiving meals every year (my wife and I) because she had a lot of family around, and they expected a traditional meal, so it was time for turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and so on. Meh.
A couple of years ago, her parents fully retired and moved to a different state, and her grandma followed. And with them gone, the cousins and aunts and uncles and other people of confusingly ambiguous relation to my wife don’t come around either. As for myself, my parents live pretty far away as well and pretty much never came, and my more distant relatives have always been on the other side of the country. So we realized that our obligations to do crap for other people is over.
So now our annual tradition is something I made up called “No Fs-Giving”. (As in, we no longer give an F, and I’m not censoring myself for this forum, that’s what we actually call it.) We just figure out what we want and have that. Pizza? Sure! Steak? Of course! Burgers? Why not?!
I’m not sure what we’re doing this year exactly, but it’s going to be delicious.
(Unfortunately we still have to put on a thing for Christmas, as family will travel here for that, but I can live with that one day out of the year.)
Beliefs and customs are one thing, morals and ethics are quite different.
Depends on the cat. One of our older cats doesn’t really go for people food, so he probably won’t. The other two older cats pretty much demand some turkey, so they’ll get some. We have two new teenage cats who haven’t had a thanksgiving yet. I think one of them won’t care for it, but we’ll probably have to defend the bird from the other one.
The one Thanksgiving tradition I do enjoy is picking at the carcass after it has cooled, and sharing some of the scraps with my dog. I have always done that with our dogs. They love it. I have expanded to when we have a whole chicken, which is more often than annually, but the Thanksgiving turkey thing with my dog is actually something I look forward to.
It sounds like a lot of us resent the obligation to host Thanksgiving. Come to think of it, I haven’t been invited to a Thanksgiving in decades - that’s probably why I am done with it.
My wife cooks a Thanksgiving dinner for my entire family each year, despite the fact that she’s not American, we don’t live in America, and none of us have lived there for decades. I guess she really likes Thanksgiving food, and she likes a holiday that (for her) comes with no baggage. Now that my parents have passed away, the yearly Thanksgiving dinner is one of the things holding my siblings and me together. I’m looking forward to it.
We’re going to be doing it on the 30th, though. Thursday’s a work day here.
What if they are horrible bigots? I am happy to spend time with people with different beliefs but not if they’re, for example, addle brained transphobic slime or virulent anti-semites. There’s a limit. These are people who I don’t want to have, you know, conversation with.
I’m not a fan of traditional Thanksgiving. Last year I had a great time on TG day though. I got together with two friends at my house. One of them put together a killer charcuterie board and we shroomed. A few of our other friends heard about it and we’re doing it again with a bigger group.
What will always be my favorite TG was in 1984. It was my first one away from home. My apartment mate and I lived in what was then a sketchy area of San Diego on the beach. We made a delicious traditional meal and invited a few of the local unhoused to help us cook and share the meal.
If by that you mean Ocean Beach, then 2-year-old me might have been your neighbor at the time. 
(I’m not sure OB ever stopped being sketchy, though it’s probably more expensive than I remember.)