Yeah, well school lunch sweet potatoes are CANNED candied sweet potatoes, which makes them even worse. Just baked is actually pretty good.
Everybody gets a pass for food allergies or for food sensitivities. No judgement zone.
But there are lots of people who’ve only ever had the big bowl of sugar glop with some potatoes mixed in and think they just don’t like the flavor of those potatoes. They might be mistaken about that. Which they would learn if they ever had a chance to taste just potatoes without glop.
We have the basics others have mentioned, but our family always has a fruit salad as a side dish. It’s peeled and cubed apples, bananas, oranges, pineapple chunks, and grapes in a sweetened whipped cream dressing. My BIL brought some German exchange students to Thanksgiving one year, and they were turned off by all the traditional foods (turkey, stuffing, potatoes, yams, squash, cranberries), but taking one bite of the fruit salad, they said “This I like!”
We also traditionally have scalloped corn casserole, which starts with canned cream corn. I’ve modified it to use whole kernel corn, since I don’t trust what’s goes into making cream corn.
We had a (not Thanksgiving) dish we called slop - spaghetti sauce over rice. I think my mom considered it a cheap and filling meal for 5 kids.
That sounds amazing!!!
I love baked sweet potatoes. When I order one at Texas Roadhouse, the server is alwaya perplexed when I ask for it with just butter. They want you to get the full-blown super-sweet extravaganza. No thanks.
If you’d like a really classic version, here’s one culled from an early draft of one of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie book series, describing an 1870s American Thanksgiving feast:
Here’s a nearly contemporary description from a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
My mother is an excellent cook. We usually have
- Roast turkey. A few times, it was smoked.
- Chestnut stuffing. Absolutely my favorite. My lovely wife now prepares a cornbread-chestnut stuffing as well to meet her food intolerance needs. Also quite tasty.
- Giblet gravy. My lovely wife now prepares one with GF flour for herself.
- Sweet potato casserole with orange slices on top.
- Cranberry-orange compote. My sister used to need a can of cranberry sauce, sliced, but no more.
- Crudite tray (please don’t revive the “crudite” thread): Celery, black olives, carrot sticks.
- Baby green peas.
- Mashed white potatoes.
- If one set of step-children will be there, they bring a spinach and Grape-Nuts dish, and possibly another entree.
- My mother used to make a quite sticky and delectable panforte, and my sister would make a fantastic highly liquor-soaked fruitcake, but those days are no more, and I make an apple crumble, which is served with ice cream or dairy-free ice cream.
- I drink water, but before 9/11 restrictions, would bring a bottle of King Estate Pinot Gris. Now my mother has a Manhattan instead. I join her in a Woodford Reserve or Knob Creek tipple on occasion.
- Some years, we bring Euphoria chocolate shaped like leaves and wrapped in colored foil in the autumn range.
That dinner sounds fantastic! Even the chestnut stuffing would tempt me. 
The Euphoria chocolate is a lovely gift for the gathering.
We’ve never done sweet potatoes, in any form, for Thanksgiving. I think we’ve done green bean casserole once or twice, but not usually. Our main veggie side is usually a cheesy broccoli-cauliflower casserole, plus always at least one or two other vegetables (corn is a common one).
What’s absolutely indispensable is the pies. Plural. Very plural. At Gramma’s house, there were usually about 20 different varieties of pie, and multiples of the more popular ones.
When I was in grad school, I mostly hung out with the international students, and we did our own Thanksgiving meal every year. They all knew that Thanksgiving was basically a harvest festival, and they knew that, like most harvest festivals, it’s primarily celebrated with a huge meal, and they knew that turkey was the traditional main course of that meal… and that’s all they knew. So everyone would bring whatever dish, in their culture, you would bring to a big celebratory meal.
It was great.
I didn’t have those things as a kid either, which is good because I don’t like them at all. Nor most of the things that make up a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Stuffing? Blech. Cranberry sauce? No thank you. The only thing I really look forward to is pumpkin pie or pumpkin cheesecake, which I am happy to either buy or make myself. I like a good sweet potato pie, too.
Sometimes I make a sweet potato souffle, which is a nice savory dish. Not happening this year, though. The turkey is coming from Popeye’s and Wegman’s will be furnishing most of the rest (Tuscan rolls, sauteed green beans, pumpkin cheesecake, mixed berries). I will make a Gatto di Napoli to fulfill the potato requirement. And there will be a can of cranberry sauce for mr. romans.
My wife will be doing most of the cooking. Mostly traditional turkey with mashed potatoes. My mom died a few years ago. My wife learned how to make her stuffing. It’s a simple bread stuffing but hard to get right. My wife does it perfect.
Of course there will also be pasta. I’ll make up a batch of sauce with meatballs and sausage and do a baked ziti on Thursday.
Trying not to Grinch, but Thanksgiving is one of the meals I dislike the most. Not because of the holiday, or even the people (mostly), but because it’s my Mother in Law’s holiday, so attendance is mandatory, and so few of the people bringing food are … adventurous in their cooking or tastes.
So my MiL makes drippy, soggy, bland/unseasoned turkey with salt and pepper as an addition, gravy from a jar, store-bought stuffing, and potatoes that are mashed to gloop and tasteless. I will say though, the two years that my FiL experimented with a home-smoked Turkey and a Deep Fried Turkey were lovely exceptions!
The older family members bring dull versions of the traditional fare: overcoked soggy green beans all but falling apart from limpness with a dusting of almonds, the obligatory over-sweet sweet potatoes with marshmallows, salad from a bag - nothing I’d want.
Of course, if it’s alcohol, well, you’re covered, everything from 4-6 bottles of good wine (one cousin works at such a store), vodka, 4 six packs of good beer, 2 of some traditional mass-market beer, you get the idea.
And the desserts are normally rice crispy squares, and a Costco pumpkin pie, and sometimes a store bought pecan pie as well.
Now the wife and I change it up frequently - homemade bacon and Tilamook sharp cheddar stuffed jalapenos, Sally Lunn style buns from scratch, Parker House rolls, Hassleback potatoes, pork souvlaki with tzatziki, you get the drift.
And thankfully, there’s one other adventurous cousin-in-law that also makes divine baked bread or other more flavorful dishes.
So each time it’s normally eat my dishes, the one the cousin-in-law brings, one slice of soggy turkey so I can be seen eating it, and then a lot of the store bought cheese cube snacks to get some staying power.
Every year I come home from Thanksgiving (Noon to 3-4pm) looking forward to dinner.
I come from a long line of poor Southern crackers, and cooking isn’t anyone’s strong suit. We’ll have the usual turkey, ham, green bean casserole, cole slaw, canned sweet potatoes with marshmallows, and deviled eggs. If we’re lucky, someone will make broccoli casserole. My aunt also makes some fruit desserts we call “banana crap” and “blueberry shit” (or is it the other way round?) My contribution is usually a cauliflower salad. It’s made with raw cauliflower, nuts, mayo, sugar, and parmesan shreds. I make it because it’s my mom’s favorite, and it’s actually pretty good, though I feel that more mayonnaise and sugar is not what is needed on the menu.
No booze! This is a Baptist household.
Huh, not mine. My plate has a lot of turkey. And a lot of fat. I’ll nibble at the mashed potatoes and stuffing, because they are traditional. But it’s turkey (okay, with gravy) and green beans steamed with some butter and dill that are the stars on my plate. The biggest carb source is the cranberry jelly, which i admit to being overly fond of.
Now the dessert…
I love a nice baked yam, but it’s not something we eat at Thanksgiving. We are northern, so we do pumpkin pie, not yam. I also make an apple pie and a spiced apple cranberry pie. The pies are served with vanilla ice cream.
Pie. sniff My aunt Brenda would make several different varieties of pie. You would try to limit just how much turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes (with turkey gravy/gravity) 
you would wolf down so you could have as many slices of her amazing homemade pies you could overfill yourself before collapsing on a couch in a comfort food coma. 
I think I had the only grandmothers in the world who didn’t bake. Nothing. Period.
On the other hand, they lived within walking distance of some amazing bakeries - real, honest-to-goodness bakeries. (One was Mikulski’s - same family as the former senator.) So we could always count on amazing breads, pies, donuts, and cakes. My grandfather would bring home 3 or 4 pies for Thanksgiving. Ah, memories!!
I don’t really have to have anything.
We don’t do green bean casserole. We just don’t. Never have.
My brother insisted on bringing it this year. I don’t know why. We’ve never had it at Thanksgiving before. Maybe his partner’s family has it?
I MUST have turkey. You can save the ham for Easter. I must have stuffing, mashed potatoes, whole cranberries, and green beans. For desert, I must have pumpkin pie.
I’ve never had a deep fried turkey, nor do I ever want it. With all the fried foods we eat throughout the year, they want us to fry our Thanksgiving turkey, the showcase of the entire meal?!! 
are you from STL? I noticed the gooey butter cake reference
My sister lives in St. Louis; she gave my mother a recipe; I made it for my in-laws and they absolutely love it.
So, let’s call it “St. Louis adjacent”.