mrAru and I do the cooking at my moms house. We drive up on thursday, and actually do turkey day on saturdays.
We get up around 5 am and have breakfast, and start cooking. We start a nice french onion soup, a beef stew or chili and fresh baked bread for an early lunch. Dinner is around 5 or so, and dessert is generally snarfed down around 9 or so, well after dinner has had a chance to digest.
The tv tends to get set on whatever football game is running, and when not cooking mrAru and I tend to game on the computers as we are not into watching football. Not sure if I will be playing EVE or surfing the internet this year =)
For us it’s an early dinner, meaning we start at 6. We usually have between 12 and 20 people, so the bird needs most of the day to cook.
6pm doesn’t strike everyone as an early dinnertime per se, but “normal dinnertime” in my family was after 8pm (when I went to college and found out the food service closed at 7pm, I was agast).
My typical routine is 4PM at my Mom’s house, and then 7PM at my Aunt’s house. My mom makes better turkey than my Aunt, but my Aunt is better at some of the side dishes, and usually has at least 5 pies for desert.
My mom used to insist on this ridiculously formal dinner around 7 or 8. Luckily, things moved earlier and earlier. My cousin had a kid, the aunts got older and it just no longer made sense to have it late. We still all sit down at the table, but things are much earlier. Plus, the early time means that we no longer have to wear semi-formal clothing. I like it when my kids dress up, but Thanksgiving dinner is typically a long, half-day affair. Even though we actually have the dinner at 2, we still have appetizers and apertifs first, then dinner, then coffee and post-dinner drinks or digestifs with dessert. We generally only get home at 6 or 7 anyway.
I still have awful memories of starched, uncomfortable dresses I wasn’t supposed to mess up and hours of sitting listening to adults droning on and on about mind-numbingly boring things. My family can be ridiculously formal about evenings, so having Thanksgiving early means the kids can just leave the table when they’re done and play nearby.
Everything my family ever did–with the exception of Christmas Eve—started at eleven. Thanksgiving, Christmas Day, birthday parties, Easter, whatever. Christmas Eve started at four. Dinner for the 11 o’clock holidays was about an hour after people arrived.
I remember my Mom, and before her my Grandma getting up at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning to start making the stuffing and get the turkey in the oven. I think a stuffed turkey takes about 15-20 minutes per pound and they always bought great big birds, enough to feed an army (or our family plus plenty of leftovers). We always ate around 1:00 PM. I don’t know why, if it was me I would have slept later and ate later.