Actually, that looks pretty good.
Also, pretty easy.
I am going to dig up Dorcas’ recipe. (Dorcas? Wow… If I was going to have a daughter, I don’t think I’d stop at “Dorcas” in the “Baby Names” book.)
I always suspected my Aunt made up the “effort” part. :dubious:
Stuffing and Cranberry sauce (from a can please).
Well, come to that, neither are mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie (as opposed to a pumpkin pudding), or dressing. If you really want to go traditional with your Thanksgiving dinner, you’d add venison, squash, eels and (I think) oysters.
I have truly never understood why anyone eats that cranberry Jello. I am an amazingly lazy cook - when my wife asks me what I plan to make for dinner, I answer “reservations” - but it’s my traditional role in the family to make the cranberry sauce, and it’s so damn easy. Wash berries. Boil a cup of water and a cup of sugar. Add cranberries. Simmer until cranberry skins have split. Stick in fridge overnight.
Making stuffing or roasting a turkey? Sure, that’s a chore. But simple cranberry sauce is easy-peasy.
Right! It’s got to have those little can rings on it so you know where to slice. 
Pretty much nothing is mandatory. The wife needs the whole turkey experience, but I’m good with a bone-in ribeye. Thanksgiving dinner this year is at Delmonico, so we both get what we want.
There is a time and a place for culinary innovation. Thanksgiving dinner is not it.
So very true. Some things are just culturally acknowledged comfort food with some regional variations. Turkey pieces held together with meat glue and sous vide is just not thanksgiving dinner.
Some things we used to have – when my mother-in-law would fix them – were bacon-wrapped water chestnuts cooked in the oven until the bacon was crisp. I could easily eat two dozen of them myself, so she had to prepare mass quantities.
Her potato salad was to die for.
Mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping warmed until the marshmallows had begun to melt.
Those are the main things I miss these days since she passed away years ago.
Nowadays we get Indian food (dot not woo-woo) from a local place and pretend we’re Pilgrims!
Along with Santa and the Easter Bunny, I think it’s safe to say there wasn’t an actual Thanksgiving dinner back in 1621, so the tradition started much later. 
Circa 1974 – I think it was exactly in 1974 – age 23 – I did a spur-of-the-moment road trip on Thanksgiving weekend, driving from Bay Area to Los Angeles along Highway 1 most of the way. Stopped in Big Sur the first night, Santa Barbara hotel in the beach district the second night. That was Thursday, Thanksgiving. Weather was chilly and drizzly.
In the evening, I went looking for some dinner, and discovered that the streets were nearly deserted and nearly nothing was open. I ended up walking down the main street feeling like a homeless destitute bum – not that I was, but I was getting hungry and nothing was open. Who knew that nothing much was open on Thanksgiving? I didn’t at the time.
After a while, I came upon a small five-and-dime-store type of shop that was open. There were a few grocery items on a shelf there. I bought a bag of animal crackers and went back out in the drizzle, munching on those.
(Actually, a bit later, I found a small hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant that was open, so I had a real dinner there.)
Fast-forward about 30 years. For no particular reason, I thought of that incident again, and decided to make a tradition of it. So, for the last several years, I eat animal crackers for Thanksgiving.
Nobody for razzleberry dressing?
stuffing and some sort of sweet potato dish
My first MIL made the most amazing stuffing with ground veal, ground pork, chopped onion and ???
she never did give me that recipe:(
Turkey and stuffing are at the top of the pyramid. Just below them is mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin/apple pie. You probably need some sort of green substance, too.
Sweet potatoes are tricky - on the one hand, I can’t remember a Thanksgiving without them, and they’re one of the quintessential “we only eat this once a year” foods, but on the other hand . . . I hate them. Let’s just say I need other people to be eating sweet potato marshmallow stuff for it to feel like Thanksgiving. Which they’re generally happy to do. 
Turkey. Everything else is optional.
A whole roast turkey. Maybe cranberry sauce (I made it once. I like the canned jelly version better.) Apple pie.
I make stuffing and mashed potatoes, but don’t usually eat them. I like gravy, but don’t consider it mandatory. We’ve never had green bean casserole, although the veg is sometimes green beans. I usually serve a butternut squash dish, but it’s not required. I usually make pumpkin pie, but won’t this year.
Stuffing. Lots of stuffing. Preferably several different variations, plus in-the-bird. There should be enough for leftovers for the next week, plus stuffing omelets on Friday morning (family tradition).
Stuffing omelets sound interesting… but if that’s what you’re having for breakfast Friday morning, then you didn’t make enough pie.
We don’t prefer it because homemade is a chore. No, it’s becasue we prefer the “cranberry jello.” It’s a jelly mass of consistent flavor and texture, not a sauce with bitter fruits in it, offset by the sweetness of the juice syrup around it.
They actually do sell that variety in cans, and it doesn’t sell nearly as well. Because, you’re right. If that’s what you want, homemade is easier.
I’m sure no one would buy crunch peanut butter at all if making it home were as easy. But they’d still buy just as much creamy peanut butter.
See, that’s my point. Tradition is an evolving thing.
I was Thanksgiving Central for years and years. The core menu items that HAD to be there by my reckoning were the turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. All homemade. All else was negotiable.
Senegoid, I like your animal cracker tradition. I have some traditions like that, too – not understood by anyone unless they catch the back story. Nice you shared it. Being from the Central Coast almost exactly halfway between your two overnight points, I know pretty much exactly what your experience was.